


called to the shepherd, said there’s a wolf at the door

by eneiryu



Series: out in the fields, out in the valley with you [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, Hayden Romero: Wrangler of Unnecessary Martyrs, Hayden's Going to Medal, Homelessness, Multi, Olympic-Level Introspection, Post Series, The Reasons People Come Back, The Reasons People Leave, post-traumatic stress symptoms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-09
Updated: 2019-12-09
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:48:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 37,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21726277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eneiryu/pseuds/eneiryu
Summary: Hayden finds Theo, first. Liam finds them both, after.
Relationships: Liam Dunbar/Theo Raeken/Hayden Romero, Theo Raeken/Hayden Romero
Series: out in the fields, out in the valley with you [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1706014
Comments: 48
Kudos: 99





	called to the shepherd, said there’s a wolf at the door

**Author's Note:**

> Credit to [XxDream_DustxX](https://archiveofourown.org/users/XxDream_DustxX), who wanted a Hayden/Theo/Liam story. 
> 
> I have to admit I wasn't expecting 37,000 words to fall out as a result, but life's full of surprises.

Hayden finding Theo at all is a complete and total fluke.

She forgets the form she’d finally remembered to get Val to sign, and if she doesn’t get it in today Redding High’s Vice Principal is going to hunt Hayden down like a dog; he’d already given her two extensions. Val sends her back a gif of some rich-looking white woman miming strangling another, equally rich-looking white woman when Hayden texts her, but she promises to bring the form to the station, which is closer to the high school than their house. Hayden sends back a quick _thanks_ and then slides her phone back into her bag before stepping out of her car to go start first period.

When she gets to the station later it’s chaos, but the usual sort of midday chaos for a major metropolitan police station. Not—not a _Beacon Hills_ sort of midday chaos, which would have already involved several maimed corpses, or heretofore-only-mythical creatures, or both. Still, Hayden drags her feet heading up to the swinging double doors leading into the station, because no matter the fact that Beacon Hills is several hours away and _several months_ behind both Hayden and her sister, the layout of the station is similar enough to that of Beacon Hills Sheriff’s Department that when she’s inside, Hayden gets these odd, sense-memory flashbacks of Sebastien Valet’s clawed hand wrapped around her upper arm, or the exact feel of the Ghost Riders’ whips coiled around her wrists. Gritting her teeth, Hayden works her jaw to get rid of the taste of reflexive adrenaline now coating her tongue and smiles in thanks at an officer who catches the door with the tip of their boot to hold it open a second longer for Hayden.

And then she catches a blast of scent from inside the station, and the smile melts right off her face.

 _Impossible_ , she thinks, and then nearly gets smacked in the face with the closing door, surprise blanking her conscious mind and only her too-fast reflexes— _christ, I hope no one saw that_ —saving her from the absolute indignity of a broken nose. She stays standing in the doorway for a frozen second, but there are officers and a gaggle of public defenders and _another_ gaggle of shellshocked-looking civilians who need to get in and/or out of the building, and Hayden’s in their way; she grimaces and hurries through, addressing a generic _sorry_ to the air of the station.

Val isn’t at her desk when Hayden gets to it—Menendez waving Hayden back into the bullpen from the front desk with a smarmy smile that says Val _definitely_ said something about why Hayden’s here _—_ but the form Hayden needs is. Hayden hesitates for a second, her fingertips resting lightly on the paper, and then she leaves it where it is, and goes to follow her nose.

It leads her down a hallway off the bullpen, and then down a set of stairs and around a corner, and then around _another_ corner a few additional steps away. She gets a few looks as she goes but she just says _looking for Val_ to anyone who seems like they’re gearing up to ask, all the while hoping that the smile on her face looks more natural and less rigid than it feels, because the scent she’s trailing is getting stronger and more unmistakable all the while.

Finally she gets to a door marked _Holding Cells_ in faded and irritatingly unevenly kerned block capitals, and stops. The handle doesn’t turn when she presses down on it, and for a split-second Hayden wants to use that as her excuse. As a perfect reason to turn right back around, and not confirm with her eyes what her nose is telling her, even though she _knows_.

She knows.

She breaks the lock, engaging her supernatural strength to just keep forcing the handle down until there’s a grinding of protesting machinery and the lock gives. She looks heavenward as she feels it happen, mouthing a silent prayer for forgiveness, and then she pushes the door lightly, and waits as it swings creakily open on its hinges.

Theo doesn’t look particularly surprised to see her.

He’s sat on a bench in the middle cell, his legs outstretched in front of him with one ankle resting on the other, his arms crossed loosely over his chest. He looks easy, and relaxed, like he’d sauntered _himself_ into the holding cell and chosen his current seat, the expression on his face its default, resting sort of _smug_. Hayden feels anger flare hot and a little unexpected in her chest.

“What the hell are you _doing_ here?” She hisses, but Theo’s eyes just flick over her shoulder.

“What the hell is _he_ doing here?” Val repeats from behind Hayden, making her jump about a mile in the air. “What the hell are _you_ doing here?” Then she blinks and fully seems to internalize the full tableau in front of her, to include the wide open door. “And what the hell is this door doing open, I’m going to _kill_ Mackinnon, he knows it’s station policy to keep it locked.”

“Uh. Menendez said you’d be here,” Hayden improvises wildly, and has to stamp down on a scowl when Theo’s lips twitch at the obvious lie.

Val just rolls her eyes and puts her hands on Hayden’s shoulders, and physically _pulls_ her out of the doorway, then pushes her a few steps to the side so that Val can reach into the room to retrieve the door handle, and pull the door back shut. She frowns once it’s closed, pushing the handle up and down a few times and frowning deeper as it jiggles easily.

“Christ,” She mutters under her breath, and lets the handle go as she reaches up for the radio pinned to her shoulder instead. “Menendez, call facilities and tell them that the lock on the door into the holding cells is broken.” 

Her radio buzzes with Menendez’s acknowledgement, but Val doesn’t pay it any attention, just gets a hand around Hayden’s upper arm—Hayden swallowing against the sense memory, _it’s not Sebastien, it’s not Sebastien_ —to start dragging her down the hallway, around the first corner and then the second, back the way Hayden had come. 

“Hey, what was he doing in there?” Hayden asks, trying to sound absently curious instead of desperate, and—at least to her own ears—failing.

Val just gives her a funny look. “Why do you care, do you know him?” 

Hayden opens her mouth to reply before realizing she doesn’t have any idea what to say. _He’s the reason you didn’t have to bury me_ , is completely unacceptable. _He’s a half-werewolf, half-coyote sociopath who murdered two people, and helped bring about the deaths of dozens of others_ , isn’t any better.

“We went to Beacon Hills High together,” She finally manages, lamely.

Val studies her for a second, undoubtedly hearing the stiltedness of her reply, but they’re back in the main bullpen now and there’s some kind of scuffle breaking out between two handcuffed men and the group of officers trying to keep them separated. “He matched the description of a robbery suspect, he was picked up earlier today,” Val tells her absently, and then yells across the room, “Hey, knock it off, Vitelli, Carlson, before we slap _another_ obstruction charge on both of you!”

Hayden frowns, skeptical. It’s not that robbery seemed outside of the crimes that Theo would be willing to commit—he didn’t have any problem with _homicide_ , after all—it just seemed wildly unlikely that he’d get _caught_. 

But Hayden doesn’t have time to keep chewing it over. Val lets out a frustrated groan and reaches down to retrieve the form lying on her desk before slapping it pointedly against Hayden’s chest. “Here’s your form, get back to school,” She orders, and then she makes a beeline across the room to the now-screeching men after Hayden brings a hand up to hold the form up instead.

Hayden looks down at the form, and then back up, and out, towards the hallway to the holding cells, her bottom lip pulled between her teeth. Her phone is in her pocket, and she could take it out, could scroll down her contact list to the _Ds_ , or even the _Ms_ , but. _This isn’t your problem anymore_ , a voice in the back of head reminds her. _You_ left _so this wouldn’t have to be your problem anymore_.

She leaves her phone in her pocket, and tucks the form into her bag, and goes back to school.

\---

Her resolve lasts all of four hours, but Theo is gone when she gets back to the station.

She can tell by the staleness of his scent, even before she gets to Val’s desk. “Hey,” She greets when Val looks up, and holds up the bag of take-out she’d brought. “Belated thank-you for the form fiasco.”

Val rolls her eyes, but accepts it. 

She sticks around to eat with Val, sat in the uncomfortable, lumpily-padded chair positioned next to Val’s desk and meant for either wide-eyed witnesses or closed-mouthed criminals, depending. Earlier when Hayden had been rationalizing her decision to come back to herself, the clincher had been her _promise_ to herself that if Theo was gone, she’d let him _stay_ gone; that she’d let it go. But as the pile of fries dumped out onto the torn-open paper bag between her and Val dwindles, Hayden knows that she’d lied to herself. She’d probably known it then, too.

Val’s working a double and so Hayden leaves her at her desk with a promise to take out the trash, and also to not answer the door if Mr. Anderson stops by for the third time in a week. “He’s just a harmless old man,” Hayden counters, rolling her eyes, but Val just scowls.

“He’s not that old, and I’m not sure he’s that harmless, either. _Don’t answer the door_ ,” She orders, and Hayden huffs, and nods, and doesn’t mention the fact that unless admittedly-slightly-skeevy Mr. Anderson happened to be a secret werewolf hunter, Hayden’s claws and fangs and ability to heal would probably win out over anything he could bring to the table. 

Back outside the station, Hayden hesitates. Theo’s scent is clear but getting staler, and for a moment Hayden wishes—helplessly and fiercely—that she’d stayed in Beacon Hills, where there were other werewolves—where there was _Scott_ and _Malia_ —who could have taught her how to better use her abilities. Who could have taught her to take in a huge gulp of Theo’s scent by the wide, swinging doors, and who could have said _he was here less than an hour ago_ , or _he left in a hurry, his chemosignals are up_. 

Hayden doesn’t know how to do any of that, so instead she just gets in her car, and rolls all the windows down, and drives slow through the streets of Redding, flipping off the angry drivers behind and around her as they lean on their horns and swear at her. There’s a part of her that’s buzzing, this specific, stupid, _come-at-me-bro_ kind of energy—she thinks of Liam, and the way his knuckles would crackle and pop as he tried to keep a reign on his temper; as he tried to keep a reign on his _wolf_ —and that part almost _wishes_ that one of the drivers would stop, and get out of their cars, and try and force the issue. It might be nerves and it might be anger and it might be something else, but whatever it is Hayden ignores it, and just concentrates on the weird sense-taste of Theo’s scent in her mouth, that odd hybrid of senses that’d come along with her golden eyes and fanged mouth and that she’d never gotten used to; that she worries, sometimes, that she’ll never _get_ used to.

After almost an hour of driving around, losing Theo’s scent several times, and having to circle around, and retrace it—she even gets out of her car, once, stood in the middle of a thankfully-deserted intersection and spinning in a circle, her nose in the air like the _worst_ kind of stereotype—Hayden is running low on gas and on patience, both with the situation and with herself. She’s idling at a turn-off to State Highway 299, hemmed in on either side by grimy, dark warehouses bordered by trash-filled parking lots, when she gets a new blast of fresh scent; her eyes widen, and she hits the gas hard enough to send herself back against her seat.

She spots Theo’s truck before she spots him, huddled back in the shadows of one of the warehouses. The cab is lit up from the inside out, Theo stood framed in the open driver’s door as he apparently digs around for something inside, but even as Hayden watches, Theo slams the door back shut and the light disappears, casting him and his truck back into near-perfect darkness. 

But it doesn’t matter, now. Hayden pulls into the lot, and—heedless of the painted lines on the asphalt—stops her car ten or so feet in front Theo’s truck. If she’s technically blocking Theo’s most direct exit, well: that’s why she’s _here_ , isn’t it? She parks, and gets out of the car.

Theo had whipped around to stare the second she’d turned into the lot, his eyes briefly shining gold in the sallow lighting. When he sees her, though—Hayden stepping out of the glare of her own headlights—he scoffs and shakes his head sharply, fingers going white-knuckled around the duffle bag in one of his dangling hands.

“Jesus, I should have known,” He spits out. “ _What_ , Hayden? What do you want?”

Hayden feels all that earlier buzzing energy solidify right into a furious disbelief. “What do _I_ want? What do _you_ want!” She snaps back. “What the hell are you even _doing_ here?”

“Trying to _leave_ ,” Theo sneers pointedly, and turns his back on her to move for his truck’s bed, lobbing the duffle bag over the edge and then leaning over it as he apparently messes with something in the back.

Hayden feels her nostrils flare, and the tips of her fingers, her gums, start to prickle. Theo straightens up and turns to look at her, his eyes narrowing as he—as he _studies_ her. The oh-too-familiar sight brings with it a tidal wave of other memories, the absolute _stench_ of the tunnels and the odd way Hayden’s skin had settled on her bones after she’d been—been _changed_ by the Dread Doctors. She narrowly resists the urge to snarl at him.

“You know what I meant,” Hayden tells him instead, forcing her tone even and controlled; forcing the shift down, and away, as best she can.

Theo studies her for a few seconds longer, and then his shoulders—his shoulders slump. “Look,” He starts, and suddenly sounds _tired_. “Does it matter what I was doing here? I said I’m leaving, you won’t have to worry about—” He doesn’t say _me_ , but Hayden hears it anyway, “—it anymore.”

But that non-answer does _nothing_ to satisfy Hayden’s original, burning curiosity, even if the exhausted angle of his shoulders causes it to lose some of its furious intensity. She watches him, and then asks before she can stop herself, “Are you leaving because you got arrested?”

Theo’s brow furrows. “What? No, why would—” But then he seems to follow her logic and it smooths back out as he shakes his head. “Today was nothing. A case of mistaken identity. They let me go when they caught the actual thief.”

He turns away again and leans back over into his truck bed. Hayden can hear him rummaging around, apparently stuffing things into the duffle bag he’d thrown in the back, but it’s background noise; it doesn’t penetrate the realization slowly blooming in her mind. 

“Then you’re leaving because I found out you were here,” She posits slowly, and knows she’s right when Theo’s shoulders winch tight. “Aren’t you?”

Theo doesn’t answer for a few seconds, and then he does. “Again, does it matter?” He asks, cranking his head around so he can look at her. “I’m leaving,” He repeats, then: “And frankly, the faster you stop _bothering_ me, the faster I can get back to successfully doing that.”

But this whole interaction has tilted Hayden’s understanding of things on its axis, and she doesn’t like how unsteady she feels. Hearing Theo had maybe done something criminal and amoralistic had made sense. Thinking Theo was fleeing town to escape punishment for his crimes had made sense. Seeing Theo behind bars had _made sense_.

Actually, she thinks, pausing: no, it didn’t. 

“Why’d you let yourself get arrested in the first place?” Hayden wonders, and feels her lips twitch against her will when Theo lets out a harsh, aggrieved sigh at her continued questions or her continued presence or both.

Theo yanks his upper body back straight, now-significantly heavier duffle bag in hand as he turns to glare at her. “Would you have preferred I kill the arresting officers instead?” He sneers.

“No,” Hayden tells him honestly. “But I would have expected it.”

Theo recoils, some, his mouth dropping softly open as he stares at her, and then he seems to shake himself, pasting his dismissive expression back on his face as he does. “Well,” He mutters, yanking open his truck’s back door to throw the duffle bag inside. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

Hayden’s about to reply as scathingly as she knows how when she catches the absolute _blast_ of strong scent that rolls out of Theo’s truck’s open door. It catches her off-guard enough that she cuts off, because… _because_ … 

Because that depth of scent—that layered complexity—had been stronger than it should have been. Hayden closes her eyes and breathes deep again, but even in her inexpert interpretation, she—knows.

Theo goes to slam the door back shut but Hayden reaches out reflexively and catches it, her brow furrowing as she meets Theo’s eyes; as she searches them. “Have you been…Are you _living_ in there?”

Theo’s expression immediately snaps shut. His eyes narrow, and he yanks _hard_ on the door—no-doubt engaging his supernatural strength to do it—to pull it away from Hayden, and slam it closed again. He shoulders past her, one hand dipping into his jean’s pocket to fish out his keys.

Hayden feels her mouth twist with frustration, and she lunges forward and grabs his shoulder. “Theo—!”

She doesn’t yet a chance to yank him around; Theo whirls back around to face her, knocking her hand off his shoulder as he goes. His expression isn’t so controlled anymore, his jaw clenched and color up high on his cheeks, his upper lip raised in the start of a snarl.

“What do you care?” He snaps, his shoulders heaving with his harsh breathing, his whole posture one big dare as he _looms_ over her.

And Hayden wants to say _I don’t care_ , or make some comment about _karma_ , or _just desserts_ , but now that she’s looking—now that she’s really _looking_ —she’s seeing things that she’d missed. Like—like how underneath Theo’s humiliated flush his cheeks look hollow, and there are dark, _dark_ circles under his eyes. The shirt and jacket around his shoulders hang looser than they had last she’d seen him in Beacon Hills, too; he’d lost some of his bulk. And once she sees it she can’t _un_ see it, Theo’s attempt to loom just becoming a pathetic affectation; an obvious lie. She can’t unsee that or the way that his hands are shaking; Hayden stares at them, and swallows past a suddenly tight throat before dragging her eyes back up, up to Theo’s face.

The same face that she’d thought had looked _smug_ , earlier. 

And she’d been so _sure_ of it, seeing Theo stretched out in the holding cell with his arms and ankles loosely crossed. He’d looked as relaxed as he ever had; as he had that one time he’d asked why he should be afraid of the police, _my record’s spotless_ just a few short days after he’d—temporarily—killed Scott. But now that she’s holding the memory in her hands, and looking at it from this new, cock-eyed angle, she’s wondering if maybe she’d just—assumed he’d looked smug. If she’d just expected that he’d look smug, because he always had before, and in assuming and expecting that he would, she’d maybe missed that he—hadn’t.

“Come eat something before you go,” She finds herself saying, and doesn’t know who’s more surprised to hear it; Theo, or herself.

“...what?” Theo manages after a few stunned seconds, the heave of his shoulders starting to slow like an overfilled balloon leaking air. 

A spike of nerves drives through the center of Hayden’s ribcage and that voice in her head from before is back and screeching, but she ignores both of those things and straightens up her posture, tips her chin up. “Come eat something before you go,” She repeats, sounding firm and sure of herself this time, even though she isn’t, not quite; not entirely.

Theo doesn’t seem to know what to do with either her offer, or Hayden, herself. His eyes narrow as he studies her face, flicking from the corners of her eyes to the line of her mouth to the jut of her chin, like he’s—like he’s looking for the corner of a mask to peel back. Like he’s looking for a trap.

“Why would _you_ want to help _me_?” He eventually demands, voice hard.

The tone of it saws at Hayden’s already shaky confidence, this specific _what-the-hell-are-you-doing_ loop that’s already playing in her head, and she snaps at him before she can help it. “It’s called human decency, jackass, and I’m not surprised you don’t know anything about it.”

Theo recoils, slightly. But she can also see his nostrils flare wide, his head tilting just a notch, and Hayden realizes all at once what he’s doing. He does it fast, too, some of the suspicion falling away from his face to be replaced with blank shock; whatever he’d heard from her, or smelled, it must not have been what he’d been expecting. It’s one of the only times she’s seen him off-footed, Theo’s gaze eventually blinking away from hers as the last of whatever put-upon aggression he’d adopted finishes draining out of him. The shape of his throat bobs when he swallows; when he brings a still-trembling hand up to rake it back through his hair.

“Look,” He finally mutters. “It’s not…I’m fine, okay? I’m not…some helpless street kid.”

And oh, Hayden _knows_ that; she’s seen the hand he’s now dropping back to his side covered in other people’s blood. But: “So?” She counters. “I never said you were.”

Theo’s starting to get frustrated, she can tell; can smell it, really, even though she can’t pick it apart quite like she knows Scott could, or Malia could, or _Theo_ could. But his scent burns in her nose, a little, this specific itching sting, and something in Hayden says: _frustration_. Something in her says: _exhaustion_. 

It says a lot of other things, too, but Hayden—doesn’t know how to translate them, properly. Can’t file them away in their proper places. 

“Hayden,” Theo tries, but it’s weak, barely more than a token protest.

“It’s just a meal, Theo,” Hayden interrupts, even while there’s a part of her that whispers _no, it isn’t_ ; that whispers _no, it won’t be_.

Theo studies her for a little longer, and then he sighs, and drops his head low on a loose, boneless neck, and says: 

“Fine.”

\---

Theo eats what she puts in front of him, slowly and deliberately. 

Too slowly and too deliberately, really, Hayden watching him out of the corner of her eye as she picks at her own plate. They’re sat at Hayden’s and Val’s secondhand-and-scuffed kitchen table in the tiny kitchen of the tiny house they’d been renting, but this is the first time that Hayden has really _noticed_ the cramped quarters; the first time she’s glanced at the walls and thought _christ, this space is small_. 

It probably has more to do with the way that she and Theo can’t stop accidentally kicking each other, no matter how hard they try. No matter how hard _Theo_ is trying, this tiny furrow of concentration between his brows like he’s putting all his—Hayden grudgingly admitting to them—considerable talents to figuring out where her legs are under the table, so he can avoid their shins, their shoes, knocking together every time one or the other stretches, or shifts. But it’s a lost cause: the table may be made of wood but it’s barely the size of a folding card table, and after a while Hayden just gives up on trying to stay out of Theo’s space. Starts enjoying his discomfort a bit, actually, a petty satisfaction blooming meanly in her chest every time Theo flinches and hunches a little further into himself when they touch; when he _fails_ to keep them from touching.

But eventually the silence becomes too much. The scrape of Theo’s fork against one of the mismatched plates Hayden and Val found at a garage sale starts cutting through the empty air like an air-raid siren, the nervous _tap-tap-tap_ of Hayden’s foot against the cheap linoleum of the floor starts to sound like miniature bombs going off, like machine gun fire, and if Hayden doesn’t _talk_ , she’s going to scream.

 _This must be what Lydia always felt like_ , she thinks, and then she asks, “Why’d you leave Beacon Hills?”

Theo jerks like Hayden’s _words_ were a bomb going off. His fork screeches across his plate in response and Hayden winces, one eye closing as she recoils slightly. Theo colors, his fingers going white-knuckled around his fork, and he tries to surreptitiously glance at her from underneath a ducked brow. It doesn’t work; Hayden’s staring right at him, openly and unashamed.

He winces when he catches her eyes and looks away, back down at his plate. There’s barely anything left on it—he’d pretty systematically cleaned it—but he prods at a sad-looking piece of sauce-covered rotini like maybe it’s holding the secret to him being able to get out of this conversation. But eventually he sighs, and sets his fork down, and then sets his head in his hands instead. 

“The Sheriff was going to arrest me,” He mutters into his palms, half-covering his face.

“He was?” Hayden replies, surprised. 

And then she’s surprised by her surprise, because of _course_ the Sheriff would try to arrest Theo. He’d _murdered_ two people. _Actually_ , Hayden thinks, correcting herself _, he’d murdered_ three _people_ ; he shouldn’t get off on a technicality just because the first one didn’t stick. But even after thinking that she’s _still_ surprised, and she examines the feeling from all angles, turning it over in her mental hands. 

And then she has it, the answer sitting obvious in front of her like the reflection caught in one of the angled faces of a cut jewel.

“Liam was okay with that?” She finds herself asking, and sees her own confusion reflected on Theo’s face when he turns his head to look at her.

“What?” Theo eyes narrow as he stares at her. “Why would…? What does _Liam_ have to do with it?”

He’s apparently sincere; Hayden stares right back at him. _But you_ … _But_ he _…_ Hayden thinks, taking in his apparently-guileless expression. Hayden nearly blurts out _do you know how many times I’ve heard the story of you saving him from the Ghost Rider at the school?_

Or his and Liam’s flight from the station with the box of keys and Liam’s too-small offering: _this isn’t even a car key!_

Or their fight at the hospital— _whatever happened to you, you deserved it_ —and then their _fight_ at the hospital, Liam saving Theo saving Liam saving Theo: _what-are-you-doing, being-the-bait_.

 _You’re an idiot_ , Hayden thinks, and doesn’t know if she’s talking to Theo, or to Liam, or—or to herself. She blinks rapidly and then looks back down, back to her own plate. It’s still half-full of now no-doubt lukewarm pasta; after a second Hayden picks it up, and leans over until she can tilt it over Theo’s, scrape the remainder onto Theo’s plate. 

“What…?” Theo starts to ask, breathy and confused, but Hayden doesn’t acknowledge his question, just sets her own plate back down and continues to press.

“How’d you know he was going to arrest you?” She asks brusquely, breezing right past the baffled and—and a little _raw_ expression on Theo’s face, like he could either navigate the conversation or deal with Hayden feeding him, but not both simultaneously. 

But after awhile practicality—or hunger—wins out. “I overheard him and Argent and Scott talking,” He finally murmurs, dropping his attention back to his now-refilled plate and picking his fork back up. He starts to eat what’s there just as slowly and deliberately as he’d eaten before, apparently unbothered by the less-than-ideal temperature. “Scott had been letting me stay in one of his house’s guest bedrooms, and I woke up one morning and heard them discussing it.”

Hayden frowns at him. “So you just _left?_ ”

Theo scowls and his grip tightens around his fork as his eyes flash gold; Hayden can just barely see the burst of color with the angle of Theo’s tilted-down face. “ _Yeah_ , I _just left_ ,” He snaps. “What, do you think I should have waited around until _after_ he’d slapped the cuffs on me?”

 _I think maybe you should have waited around to see if that talk was just talk_ , she thinks, but doesn’t say, her mind spooling back through all the half-planned, half-frantic McCall pack meetings she’d ever been willingly or unwillingly made a part of. Their habit—derived knowingly or not from Scott, probably—of laying out all their options like cards on a table to see the full spread of possibilities before they’d inevitably pick the one that would save the most people.

Whether those people necessarily deserved saving, or not.

“Hmmm,” Hayden just says, and stands up with her plate in hand to take it over to the dishwasher. 

When she straightens back up and looks at him, Theo is just turning away from darting a subtle glance at the fridge; the place where she’d pulled out the tupperware container full of pasta when they’d first arrived. She leans back against the counter for a few moments, considering, and then she turns back around and goes up on her toes, reaching for the cabinet just to the left of the sink. 

She walks back over to the table and drops the box of cookies between them, Theo jumping at the noise like she’d dropped an anvil rather than a cardboard box. He doesn’t reach for them, though, just stares at her with wide eyes from over his once-again clean plate, that baffled and just a little suspicious expression creeping back onto his face. 

Hayden doesn’t acknowledge it, just reaches for the box and flips it open, sliding the tray full of cookies free. She takes one and breaks it in half, setting one piece on Theo’s plate before popping the other in her mouth. “When was this, anyway?” She asks around her mouthful of cookie, pointedly ignoring Theo’s narrow-eyed glances between the halved cookie and her face.

“...a few weeks ago,” Theo eventually responds, when Hayden does nothing but watch him expectantly. He reaches for the piece of cookie Hayden had set on his plate and chews it slowly, then swallows and says, “After Monroe.”

He shoots her a searching look, clearly checking to see if that _after Monroe_ means anything to her. And it does: Liam had called her back when it all started, the first time they’d talked in _weeks_ —that _Liam_ had been willing to talk to _her_ in weeks, all her previous texts and calls gone unanswered—to ask if anyone was acting _strange_ in Redding. He’d been so stupidly cagey about it, too, at first, Hayden getting angrier and angrier with his vagueness until she’d realized with an abrupt _pop_ of clarity that he was trying not to alarm her; that he was trying to respect some unspoken boundary he’d put in place, or that he thought _she’d_ put in place, like Hayden leaving Beacon Hills to protect her sister had meant that she’d left all the rest of it behind, too. 

_Jesus, Liam, I’m still a werewolf_ , She’d eventually snapped: the cleanest way she could think of to sum up the absurdity of one or both of them trying to pretend like she wasn’t still a part of his world. Liam had stammered out an apology, and then eventually explained the full story, and once he was done Hayden had told him no, that apparently the insanity was contained to Beacon Hills, as per usual. 

_Yeah,_ Liam had agreed, low and with good humor and noticeably self-deprecating. _I guess you made the right call, huh, leaving when you did?_ He’d added, and Hayden had stared blankly at the wall for a few seconds before abruptly hanging up on him. Liam had tried to call back exactly twice, and then he’d stopped, and Hayden had spent the next week alternately righteously furious and helpless-tears _ashamed_ , both with him and with herself. And then she’d swallowed it all down, and forced herself to get on with her life. To leave Beacon Hills where she’d deliberately put it:

 _Behind_ herself.

“I know about Monroe,” Hayden assures Theo, stilted through a tense jaw.

Theo’s eyes widen, a bit, but he doesn’t push, just looks back down at his plate. Actually he darts a glance at the box of cookies, first, and _then_ looks back down at his plate. Hayden’s throat tightens up a bit but she forces herself to roll her eyes, even though Theo’s not looking at her to see it, and reaches forward for another cookie, breaking it in half again and dropping one of the pieces in front of Theo.

He doesn’t look at her, this time, but she can see his throat bob as he slowly reaches forward, and picks up the piece. Hayden watches as he puts it in his mouth and chews it, just as slowly and deliberately as he had each of his forkfuls of pasta.

“So you’ve been living out of your truck for weeks now,” Hayden summarizes, and winces a little internally at the harsh tone to her own voice; she hadn’t necessarily meant her words to have those barbed edges, but thinking of Liam always seems to put them there. Theo flinches, and colors, and doesn’t say anything. “Where are you going to go once you leave?”

“Dunno,” Theo mutters. “Oregon, maybe.”

Oregon, maybe, where he’d spend the time living out of his truck and _clearly_ half-starving himself out of necessity or choice or both. Hayden watches him watch his plate, watches him try _not_ to watch the box of cookies sitting less than a foot in front of him; watches him try not to look back at the fridge, or the cabinets.

Or the couch, just visible through the entryway between the kitchen and living rooms, the stretch of it actually long enough to contain his full height, unlike the cramped back seat of his truck. 

Hayden stands again. “Well, wherever you’re going, it’s late. You should just stay here tonight, leave tomorrow morning.”

She’d stood up and headed for the counter—full of a pile of unopened mail, which Hayden starts too-deliberately sorting through, and opening—so that she wouldn’t have to look at Theo, but when the silence stretches long enough to start sawing at her nerves again and she glances back at him, Theo is staring openly at her anyway. Hayden feels her jaw tighten, and she holds his gaze and then abruptly decides to double-down on her nonchalant act, a strange sort of euphoric buzz starting up under her skin as she takes in his discomfort; as she revels in the strange sensation of having put _him_ on his back foot, for once. 

As she forces _him_ to try and navigate a situation over which he has no control, with rules he doesn’t know and can’t understand, and consequences he can’t anticipate: _let’s see how_ you _like it_. 

“Help yourself to the fridge, too,” She adds, her voice a too-high sort of blasé. Not even an affectation so much as a full-bodied embodiment of her self-contradictory effort to be a mean-spirited sort of charitable. “You’d be doing us a favor in cleaning it out, me and Val always swear we’re going to cook and then never do.”

Theo just keeps staring. “Why are you…?” He starts, and then his expression twists uncertainly and he looks blinking away before forcing his gaze back up to hers. Hayden doesn’t help him out, just keeps opening envelopes, tearing them open deliberately over-loud for the way it makes him wince every time. Finally he takes a deep breath and asks, “This isn’t…you’re not… This isn’t because of the alpha bond, is it?,” sounding as unsure as she’s ever heard him; Hayden looks up from her latest envelope to stare at him, her sudden strange surge of excitement bursting and evaporating like an overfilled balloon.

“ _What?_ ” She squawks, and Theo flinches like she’d struck him.

“The alpha bond,” He repeats inanely. “Because you… Because _I_ …” He doesn’t manage to finish either sentence, and finally just blurts out instead, “Is it still affecting you?”

And Hayden can’t help it: she starts to _laugh_. 

It’s not a pleasant sound. Either to herself, personally, or to Theo, apparently, who winces and hunches a little further in on himself. But she can’t _stop_ , these helpless little hiccuping giggles escaping her lips, because of _course_. Of course Theo would wrack his brain for a _reasonable explanation_ , she thinks, catching glimpses of Theo’s just completely _thrown_ expression through her gasping laughs. Of course there’d have to be something _supernatural_ about Hayden’s offer, her behavior all night; he’d never be able to understand it otherwise.

Of _course_. 

“God, you—” She starts, and then has to cut herself off, snorting another horrible, horrible sounding giggle. “You’re unbelievable.” She finally manages.

Theo scowls, _hurt_ —of all things—flashing obvious across his face before he wrestles back control of his expression. “Excuse _me_ for wondering what the hell is _wrong_ with you tonight, you’re _clearly_ —”

But Hayden cuts him off, suddenly angry again. “It’s called _human decency_ , jackass, and I’m not surprised you don’t know anything about it.”

Theo stops trying to talk over her, meeting her heated glare with another dumbfounded stare. Hayden holds his eyes for a few more long, silent seconds—the tiny kitchen practically ringing with the echoes of their argument—and then she scowls, and rips her fingers free of the envelope she’d been midway through opening—she hisses as the flap slices through the meat of her thumb—and throws it back down on the counter. There’s a drop of blood staining it, now, but Hayden doesn’t care about that anymore than she cares about the already-closing cut on her finger, or the dark circles under his eyes and his too-thin shoulders. 

“You know what,” She snaps. “Stay, leave, I don’t care anymore. Do what you want.” 

She starts to storm out of the kitchen, back towards her bedroom, but there’s a sudden scrape of sound and a hand on her wrist.

“Hayden, don’t—!” Theo starts, jerking her to a stop; Hayden glares down at Theo’s fingers wrapped carefully around her skin and then back up into Theo’s wide eyes. “Look, I’m _sorry_ , okay. I just—I just don’t get it,” He tries to explain, and then he swallows, and says more quietly: “I don’t get why _you_ would want to help _me_ , it just doesn’t make any sense.”

His confession is so raw that it soaks up all her righteous fury like salt soaking up spilled wine; Hayden feels her tense body start to sag, some, and she jerks her head helplessly away from him, all too aware of her pulse beating tellingly against the fingers Theo still has wrapped around her wrist.

“I don’t know,” She confesses in turn, just as quietly. “I don’t… You helped save everyone, back during the Wild Hunt. You helped save—”

She doesn’t say _Liam_ ; she usually tries not to.

Theo flinches like she had anyway, his fingers spasming around her wrist. It’s only then that he seems to realize that he still has hold of her and drops her hand away immediately, like the touch had started to burn him. They stand there, then, in the awkward silence of the hallway, and then Theo starts to shake his head, slow at first and then more quickly.

“No,” He finally says. “No, I—I appreciate it, but—”

But Hayden _doesn’t want to hear it_. 

“You’re _unbelievable!_ ” She shrieks at him again, a part of her absently embarrassed by her shrill tone but that part just _completely_ overwhelmed by the noxious cauldron of _everything else_ in her chest: the blank surprise she’d felt when she’d first smelled Theo at the station today; the low-simmering fury that’d been bubbling in her chest as she’d tracked him through town; the absolute _shock_ she’d felt as she’d stared at his truck after she’d realized he’d been living in it.

The _something_ that she’d had to swallow, and swallow, and swallow around as she’d watched him carefully—so carefully—eat whatever she’d offered him, and just as carefully not ask for anything more.

And now, with Theo staring at her so wide-eyed and open, all his defensiveness stripped away by surprise or exhaustion or the sheer _unreality_ of today, that noxious mix finally solidifies, and hardens, and rushes up, and out of Hayden’s throat.

“Why is it that the _only time_ you won’t take ruthless advantage of someone is when they’re genuinely trying to _help you?!_ ” 

If Hayden had thought the house had been silent before, it’s _nothing_ to how silent it becomes after she’s yelled that. Theo takes an actual, physical step away from her. From her heaving shoulders, and cracked open expression, and the way that her hands have balled into furious—furious and _clawed_ —fists. Hayden stops, and brings her hands up in front of her chest, slowly uncurling them as she looks down at her bloody palms and the eight neat punctures punched through the meat of her hands.

 _Ow_ , she thinks, but absently, her shock overwhelming any actual feeling of pain. 

“Hayden, jesus,” Theo stammers, and suddenly reaches forward like he was going to take her hands in his, study the already-healing injuries.

Hayden yanks her hands away from him, glaring and heedless of the way that Theo freezes, the wide-open look on his face falling, some.

“Stay, or leave,” She just repeats, tone and expression and shoulders a forced sort of even. “I don’t care anymore.”

And then she turns around very deliberately, and leaves him standing there stock-still and barely breathing, and walks herself to hers and Val’s shared bathroom to wash the blood off her hands. 

She runs the water fast, and hot, and concentrates on the rushing sound of it and the stinging of her skin to avoid concentrating on the rest of the house. On the way the floorboards in the hallway creak when footsteps walk across them, or the way the front door squeaks in a very particular way when opened, or anything but the rush and rush and rush of the water. She scours her palms clean, taking deliberate and unnecessary care to make sure she gets every last fleck of blood out from underneath her nails, and only then does she turn the water off. 

When she finally looks up some time later, towel in hand as she scrubs her palms and fingers dry, she sees Theo in the mirror leaned up half-in and half-out of the doorway, his eyes and expression downcast and shame-faced. 

He looks up when he hears the water shut off, or when he senses her attention, or whatever. “If I was… If I was going to stay,” He starts, and then doesn’t finish, wincing halfway through and then just never resuming; Hayden stares at him, her jaw working.

“The couch,” She finally tells him, and sets the towel down on the bathroom counter. “I’ll grab you some blankets.”

\---

Hayden wakes up the next morning to Val screeching her name.

 _Oh, shit_ , she thinks blankly, and then she scrambles out of bed, and down the hallway to the living room. She’s wearing nothing but the tiny shorts she went to sleep in and a thin white t-shirt with no bra, the propriety of which she doesn’t fully register until she all but trips into the living room wearing them and Theo’s eyes—Theo sat on the couch in a pool of blankets and with Val standing over him still in her deputy’s uniform like some kind of furious jail warden—flick briefly to her chest and then to her bare legs before he colors and looks away. Val catches the glances anyway and scowls, jerking her head up to transfer her glare from Theo to Hayden instead.

“What the hell is _this?_ ” She demands, gesturing at Theo’s hunched-in shoulders and the fingers he’s got twisted white-knuckled together in the blankets in his lap.

“I, um,” Hayden starts, her mind a complete blank and her frantic glances at Theo’s downcast eyes going unmet.

“I, um,” Val repeats, high and mocking, then: “Hayden!”

Giving up, Hayden hurries forward and gets a hand around Val’s upper arm, and starts dragging her towards the back door. Val resists, at first, clearly not wanting to leave Theo alone in their house, but Hayden pulls insistently—maybe a little _supernaturally_ —and eventually she relents, and goes, letting Hayden yank her through the doorway and out onto the back porch. 

It’s barely dawn, and Hayden’s skin pimples with gooseflesh as she slides the porch door back shut. Val plants her feet and crosses her arms, and as inured to it as she should be, the sight of the deputy’s uniform in particular still makes the squirming, guilty thing in Hayden’s gut squirm worse; Hayden curls her bare toes against the cold concrete beneath her feet and tries to think of something to say.

“Look, it’s not a big deal,” She eventually attempts, which is the same thing she’d repeated to herself last night on a never-ending loop as she’d tried to fall asleep, too-aware of the sound of Theo’s pulse and the steady rasp of his breathing down the hall. It doesn’t sound anymore convincing out-loud than it did last night, and it’s also _clearly_ the wrong opening salvo to use against Val; her eyebrows shoot up and her arms come uncrossed as she starts to gesture furiously. 

“Not a _big deal?!_ ” Val shrieks, and Hayden flinches and starts patting at the air in a desperate _quiet down_ gesture, her gaze jumping nervously to their neighbors’ windows. “Hayden, I _arrested him_ yesterday!”

“Yeah, for a case of mistaken identity!” Hayden retorts, remembering what Theo had said. “He hadn’t actually—” robbed anyone, though christ knows—though Val doesn’t—that he’d done a lot _worse_.

“So you bring him into our _house?_ ” Val talks over her, staring at her in disbelief. “You let him _sleep over?_ Just you and him, _alone?_ ”

It takes Hayden a second to understand what she’s getting at, and she has to stop herself from sputtering out a disbelieving laugh. She doesn’t know how to explain that it isn’t like that, that it isn’t anything like _that_. That Theo probably wouldn’t touch her if his life depended on it. That it’d be the _opposite_ , actually—that his life would depend on him _not_ touching her, because if he did, his life would be forfeit the second Liam or Scott or the rest of the McCall pack found out about it. 

The absolute, unquestioned _certainty_ Hayden feels when she thinks that draws her up short, and she has to swallow around a suddenly tight throat.

“It’s not—it wasn’t like that,” Hayden finally manages, and she must sound as choked up as she suddenly feels because Val’s furiously heaving breathing starts to slow as she stares at Hayden in confusion.

Finally she exhales out roughly and rakes her fingers back through her hair, which—because it’d been back in her usual, careful braid—has the unintentionally-comedic result of giving her a frizzy halo. “So what _was_ it like, then?” She demands, more quietly but with her voice still hard. 

And Hayden opens and closes her mouth a few times, her gaze helplessly darting through the glass of the porch door to look at Theo, who’d freed himself from his tangle of blankets to plant his feet on the ground and drop his head in his hands. He can hear every word they’re saying, Hayden knows, but there’s nothing she can do about that anymore than she can tell Val the truth. 

Or not the _whole_ truth, anyway; Hayden swallows, again, and drags her gaze back to Val’s. 

“He’s homeless,” She finally mutters. “I found out—I found out last night.”

 _That_ causes the last of Val’s righteous indignation to fade. “What?” She replies blankly, her eyes flicking away from Hayden and briefly over to Theo, too, before she looks back. “How do you—?”

Hayden sucks in a deep breath. “He told me.” _Lie_. “I went to go meet up with him, after I left the station last night.” _Lie_. “I hadn’t seen him in a while, and I was wondering what he was doing here.” _Truth_.

Val’s jaw tightens. “That still doesn’t explain—”

Hayden cuts her off. “He’s lost a lot of weight, okay?” She says, raising her voice so that she’s speaking over Val. “And—and he’s been sleeping in his _truck_ , and I just…”

She gives it a few seconds of silence as she wracks her brain to try and put words to what she was _just_ , and then she gives up, and shrugs, her arms coming to cross over her chest. It’s not _cold_ , exactly, but it’s not even fully dawn and Hayden is in _shorts_. And anyway, the prick of Val’s disappointment might be worse than the chill of the early morning air. She darts a look up at Val from under her brow, only to find Val staring tight-mouthed off to the side, like she’s thinking of every statistic she’s ever read on the survivability of teen homelessness; like she’s seeing the body of every teenage runaway she’s ever watched be fished out of a river, or from underneath a dirty concrete overpass. 

“What about his parents, where are his parents?” She finally demands, and Hayden recognizes the interrogatory tone sneaking into her voice; her deputy’s brain activating, willingly or not.

“I don’t know,” Hayden answers truthfully. “He was—staying with friends, when I knew him in Beacon Hills.” Referring to the Dread Doctors as _friends_ is probably the single most egregious lie has Hayden has ever told, but she also doesn’t have any better explanation; Val frowns, her eyes studying the pinched expression Hayden can feel on her own face.

Val blows out a long, slow, thoughtful breath. “Well, okay,” She finally says, and some of the hardness has drained out of her voice, though Hayden knows it isn’t the end of Val’s ire with Hayden, specifically. “I can take him to the station later, call Children and Family Services. Get him into a foster home.”

Hayden blinks, thrown. That hadn’t occurred to her for a whole _host_ of reasons, none of which she can offer, and she’s still trying to recover from her surprise when a flash of color catches her eye from inside the house. 

“No, you can’t,” Theo says as he slides open the back door and steps down onto the porch, answering Val’s suggestion and therefore tacitly admitting he’d been eavesdropping. He both looks and sounds exhausted, no matter the fact that he’d been able to sleep in a real house for the first time in literal _weeks_ , apparently, and he leans back against the closed door when he’s done, both his hands still on the handle behind his back; his chest and belly and the vulnerable stretch of his throat exposed. “I’m over eighteen.”

He gives Val the flicker of something that’s trying to be an apologetic smile, but either the awkwardness or the insanity or just the sheer absurdity of the situation turns it into a closed-mouth grimace, and he looks away, catching Hayden’s eyes briefly before jerking away from them, too. 

The line of Val’s mouth tightens as she studies _him_ now, instead. “Welfare, then,” She substitutes. “We’ve got someone at the Department of Social Services we can call who can help you fill out the paperwork.”

Theo just shakes his head. “That won’t work, either,” He tells Val quietly, and Hayden wonders if Val can see—if Theo even _knows_ —that the muscles of his neck are straining as he—as he apparently tries not to look at _Hayden_ ; like he’s maybe worried she’s going to spill out his whole sordid origin story right onto the cold concrete porch. “I’d need—documents. A birth certificate and a social security card and all that, right?” He double-checks, and gets his answer when Val just continues to watch him in stony silence. “I don’t have any of those. I don’t have anyone to ask to _get_ any of those.”

 _Oh, no, he wouldn’t_ , Hayden thinks, and has to stifle another high, completely inappropriate giggle when she gets an absurd flash of—of the _Pathologist_ or the _Surgeon_ carefully filing away the paperwork of the boy they’d stolen; of the potential killer they’d literally bred into being. Theo glances at her, brow furrowing, as he apparently catches some change to her scent or pulse or whatever, but he looks away fast; Val is still looking at _him_.

“Look, it’s not—it’s not as bad as it sounds,” Theo suddenly says, and Hayden stiffens as she recognizes the tone. Or the _start_ of it, anyway, the barest hint of Theo’s smooth, insinuating, _trust-me_ drawl; the one he’d used to slither his way into the cracks between the McCall pack before ripping them apart. Theo winces as she thinks all that, and Hayden doesn’t think it’s an affectation for her sister’s sake; his nostrils briefly flare. “I’ve already got a line on a job, it’ll just take me a little while to save up enough for a—for a place.”

But Val’s eyes just narrow, and Hayden catches Theo’s mistake. “If you don’t have any paperwork, how exactly are you going to get this _job?_ ” She asks calmly, and Theo freezes, his eyes flicking helplessly up to hers.

There’s a long few seconds of silence, Hayden watching Val watching Theo watching Val, and then Val sighs, long and drawn out.

“This job of yours,” She finally asks, resigned the way only a law enforcement officer with a history of earnestly if futilely busting illegal employers can be. “What is it, and how _safe_ is it?”

Theo hesitates, clearly debating whether to risk telling her what he knows. “Construction. And—and rumor has it the boss treats his people well,” He finally replies. There’s another split second of hesitation, and then he adds pointedly, “ _All_ his people.”

Val’s jaw clenches, but she nods, after a beat. She brings a hand up and drags it down her face, heedless of the way that both Hayden and Theo are staring at her openly, now, waiting for her—her _final judgement_ , the pronouncement of which Hayden hadn’t even realized she’d been expecting. It takes another handful of long, _long_ seconds, but finally Val sighs again and plants her hands on her hips, looks at Theo head-on and no-nonsense.

“Okay,” She starts, both Hayden and Theo straightening up. “We do this—we _all_ do this—it’s on one condition.” Hayden frowns, not even able to think yet about that _one condition_ , because she realizes she has _no idea_ what the ‘this’ is. “You work with me, or someone at the station, to get new copies of all your documents. You _cannot_ keep going like—like some kind of _ghost_.”

 _That is disturbingly accurate_ , Hayden thinks, remembering the exact way that the ground had split open to reveal Theo’s clawed hand as he’d been dragged himself out of the skinwalker’s prison—a revenant in the strictest sense—but then she’s jolted out of it, because Theo is staring wide-eyed at her sister.

“I don’t—understand,” Theo says slowly, glancing at Hayden as if for a clue; Hayden just shakes her head slightly, just as baffled.

Val glances back and forth between the two of them like they’re idiots; like they’re missing something obvious. Finally she scowls and fixes her attention on Hayden. “Was this _not_ your plan?” She demands, gesturing at Theo and, seemingly, the house behind him. “Him staying here until he gets back on his feet?”

 _Oh_ , Hayden thinks, absently aware of Theo going rigid next to her. “I—hadn’t actually thought that far ahead,” Hayden admits, because it seems like the safer option than acknowledging the guilty twist in her gut that says: _maybe_.

Hayden’s confession seems to snap Theo out of his speechless spiral, and he eyes Val warily as he carefully says, “I don’t—I don’t think that that’s—”

Val cuts him off. “Oh, you have someone else you can stay with?” She asks, falsely bright.

“...no,” Theo admits after a second, “but…” 

“Somewhere else to stay other than your _truck_ , then,” Val presses mercilessly, her voice still that false, dangerously saccharine _trap_.

“No, not that, either, but—” Theo tries to argue, but Val just slices a hand through the air, and he shuts up instantly.

“My sister may have gone about it in _the exact wrong way_ ,” Val starts, turning to glare at Hayden as she says the last part before turning her glare right back on Theo, “but she had the right idea. You can’t live out of your truck, that’s not an acceptable solution. Short-term or otherwise.”

“But it’s _not your problem_ ,” Theo retorts hotly, and if his eyes are shining a little more brightly than they should be in the dawning sun, Val probably doesn’t know enough to realize. “It’s not _either of your prob—_ ”

This time he cuts himself off, because Val had started pointedly tapping at the sheriff’s badge on her chest. He gapes at her for a moment, and then looks helplessly back at Hayden, who knows she’s going to be absolutely _no help at all_ , because she’s already gaping at Val, too.

Val gives it a few more seconds to see if either of them are going to be able to come up with a cogent argument, and then she smiles in sharp satisfaction, and straightens up. She also claps her hands, once, causing both Theo and Hayden to jump.

“Okay, then!” She announces. “ _I_ just worked a double shift, so I am going back inside, and going to bed. _You_ ,” She continues, pointing at Hayden, “are going to help _him_ ,” she transfers her pointing finger to Theo, “clean out the basement, so he has somewhere to sleep that _isn’t my couch_.” She eyes them both until first Hayden and then Theo nod, stiltedly, and then she concludes, “And do it _quietly_ —last night was a bitch of a shift.”

She keeps eyeing both of them until they both nod, again, and then she raises her eyebrows at Theo. He doesn’t get it until he does, scuttling quickly away from the door and winding up by Hayden’s side, close enough that she can feel his heat warming her bare skin. Val gives them both one last, searching look—her eyes softening some—and then she heads back inside and disappears down the hallway towards hers and Hayden’s bedrooms; Hayden and Theo both flinch reflexively when they hear her door thunk shut.

They stand there in awkward silence for a minute or so, and then Theo seems to shake himself and looks at her. It’s a searching glance, unsure and wary, and paired with the way he’s absently rubbing his hands over his bare arms—his forearms pimpled with gooseflesh, too—it makes him seem incongruously…soft. Young, maybe; as young as he actually is. Hayden swallows, but doesn’t look away from him.

“So I guess we should…get started?” He eventually says, tilting his head towards the house and, presumably, the stairs down to the basement; Hayden stares at him.

“You’re kidding,” She finally says, and Theo’s face falls, his expression crumpling inwards before he can apparently help it. But Hayden’s not done, and so she ignores the way his downcast eyes and twisting scent make her _own_ chest twist and demands, “After all that bullshit last night, you’re just going to agree?”

Theo looks back up at her and stares for a long few seconds, his mouth opening and closing, and then he looks away, his cheeks—his cheeks _coloring_. “Yeah, well. You were the one who pointed out that I wasn’t acting like myself, by not taking ruthless advantage of you.” Hayden’s brow furrows, and Theo’s lips twist; it was maybe meant to be a sharp smile like all of Theo’s other sharp smiles, but he doesn’t quite pull it off. But then he straightens up, some, and concludes a little defiantly, “I’m just… _reverting_ _to character_ , like you apparently wanted.”

He’s trying to get a rise out of her, maybe; trying to see if Val’s offer was more fragile than it seemed. To see if _Hayden_ wouldn’t be able to uphold it, Val’s grand pronouncement notwithstanding. Hayden feels her jaw clench, and she shoulders past him without a word, back towards the door. 

“Well, come on, then,” She snaps, when he doesn’t follow her. Theo looks up at her from where his gaze had fallen down to the ground again, his shoulders rounding, and his expression goes wide-open with surprise for a second before he apparently manages to wrestle back control of it and slams it shut again. Hayden watches all of that, and then she tosses her head and informs him, “I’m not cleaning the basement out by _myself_ , you asshole.”

Theo hesitates for a second longer, his searching eyes on her face. And then he swallows, and moves to follow her.

\---

So Theo moves in with Hayden and her sister, and Hayden—even though the entire thing is arguably her own fault—does her best to avoid him.

It should have something to do with Theo himself—Hayden starts out trying to _insist_ to herself that it’s about Theo himself, about who he is and what he’s done—but really it has more to do with _Liam_. 

With Liam, and the way that Hayden will find herself pausing after Theo’s slipped out of his stilted new set of habits—close-mouthed and nervous and always on this weird, robotic set of _best behaviors_ , especially around Val—and back into the acerbic, infuriatingly arrogant asshole Hayden had known him to be. She’ll pause, and wait, this expectant silence just stretching and stretching and _stretching_ between them until it snaps; until Theo gives her a strange look, and seems to catch himself, and closes his expression, or the steadily broadening breadth of his shoulders, back down, the silence going heavy and awkward instead of poised on the edge of something else.

Instead of poised on the edge of an argument, or a frustrated snarl, or a maybe-joking-maybe-not threat of physical harm, because Liam isn’t there to make any of those things.

But the thing is, avoiding Theo is easier than it should be. 

He leaves before Hayden gets up for school and he comes back late in the evenings, sweaty and filthy and always disappearing immediately into the basement. He’s not _rude_ about it—he always has these charmingly brief snatches of conversation with Val first, if she’s around—but he does it so effortlessly that it takes Hayden an embarrassingly long time to realize that he’s doing it _intentionally_. That he’s retreating to the futon that Val had rescued from a recently-returned college kid of one of the older deputies at the station, and sticking to the tiny, cramped bathroom shoved in the corner of the basement when possible, like if he just tries hard enough, he can make _out of sight, out of mind_ into something more than a simple proverb. 

She’s not the only one who notices, either; after a few weeks Val starts frowning at the basement door after Theo has disappeared through it, and then she’ll glance at the clock on the wall, and Hayden can almost see her doing the math inside her head.

So the next time Val’s working a late shift, and Theo stumbles in and then immediately tries to beeline it for the basement, Hayden twists around on the couch from where she’d been mindlessly watching TV and pops her head up over the back of it to warn him, “You know, if you don’t calm it down with the hours, Val is going to end up arresting your illegal employer after all.”

Theo freezes in the middle of the hallway and jerks to look at her, all wide eyes and caught expression. 

Hayden just holds his gaze for a second, and then she raises an eyebrow and turns back around to flop back down onto the couch, returning her attention to _whatever_ the hell is on-screen, though—Ghost Rider’s gun to her head—she couldn’t say what it is. She hears the floorboards creak after a few seconds, and then the distinctive groan of the basement door hinges, and she scowls at the TV, her arms crossing as she burrows a little further into the cushions. 

But two days later, she comes into the kitchen to grab something to eat before she heads to school, and finds Theo at the table blearily poking at a bowl full of oatmeal. 

He looks up when she stops in the doorway and stares at him, and it could be a trick of the rose-tinted dawn slanting in through the window over the sink, but his cheeks look like they’re flushed darker than normal. “I got moved to afternoon shifts for the rest of the week,” He explains gruffly, and then immediately stuffs a spoonful of oatmeal between his lips, like having a mouthful of food is some kind of unbreakable protection against having to say anything else.

Hayden stares at him for a few seconds longer, and then she shakes herself out of it and heads for one of the cabinets, pulling down a half-empty box of Pop-Tarts and sliding a package free. “Can you tell Val I’ll be home late, then?” She asks offhandedly, giving the process of sliding the Pop-Tarts into her bag _way_ more attention than it deserves. “I’ve got a group project in English that’s due next week, we’re meeting in the library after school to work on it.”

“...okay,” Theo agrees after a long pause, instead of asking why Hayden couldn’t just _text_ Val that, or use the magnetic notepad they’ve got stuck to the fridge for exactly that purpose. Hayden leaves him in the kitchen without another word, but she catches herself thinking about it the rest of the day; about those soft two syllables, _oh-kay_ , and the weird little flare of warmth they’d set to twisting in her chest. 

She sees Theo more, after that; her and Val both do. 

He seems to take Hayden’s warning to heart and scales back his hours. More than that, as much as he still retreats to the basement after he comes back from work covered in dirt and grime and sweat, he comes back _up_ afterwards, freshly showered and with his bottom lip almost permanently between his teeth. He’ll grab a plate of whatever Hayden or Val had disinterestedly cooked—or, more typically, picked up—and eat it at first the table, and then eventually on one-half of the couch with Val and Hayden, instead of slinking back down to the basement like he usually had before. 

He also doesn’t say much, until he does.

That part’s more Val’s doing than Hayden’s. Val picks and prods at him the way Hayden has seen her pick and prod at reluctant witnesses, slowly peeling back layers until the words come spilling out. Theo gets this look on his face when she’s doing it, like he’s simultaneously aware of _exactly_ what she’s doing, but unable to stop himself from responding to it, one word answers becoming whole sentences becoming whole _stories_ , Theo and Val laughing on opposite ends of the couch, or across the kitchen from each other, grinning and grinning and grinning. Hayden doesn’t know how many or how much of the stories Theo tells are true, but they’re always charming nonetheless, the perfect alchemic mix of funny and clever and good-naturedly self-deprecating; more than once she’s seen Val collapse into breathless giggles on the couch, rolling up like a pill-bug as Theo’s lips twitch with a badly suppressed grin as he watches, and tries to pretend he isn’t.

And the thing is, Hayden doesn’t think Theo is necessarily doing it on _purpose_ , she just thinks that he—is what he is. And at least what he _was_ , was trained by three sociopathic, quasi-immortal serial killers to be their perfect spy. He’d literally been bred to convince people to like him, to trust him, and it doesn’t seem to be a skill that he knows how to turn _off_. Hayden’s not actually sure it even _is_ a skill anymore, actually: she wonders if maybe it’d been a role that Theo had stepped into for so long and so completely that it’s just—who he‘s become. A perfect personification of a perfectly-normal person, but the whole thing still just an _act_ ; a convincing costume sitting atop the skeleton frame that the Dread Doctors had constructed of him.

Hayden can’t help but find it a little tragic, sometimes, her throat going tight as she wrenches her gaze away from the stupidly charming tableau of him and Val sprawled out on the couch, or sat at the table; as Theo glances at her with his nostrils flaring, his eyes searching her face.

And most of the time Hayden can be magnanimous about it all—about Theo’s presence, and how he no longer looks so thin, or acts so spooked-colt skittish—but sometimes she can’t be. Sometimes she remembers just _who_ he managed to get to like him, and trust him, and what he did to them once he had, and she gets _furious_ at him all at once, like a switch flipping. 

Val doesn’t get it when it happens but _Theo_ does, his expression closing right back down like it had for the first few weeks after he’d moved in and _staying_ closed, and Hayden had never been around guilt—not _true_ guilt anyway, never more than Val’s guilt at eating the last of the ice cream, or forgetting to pick up more toothpaste—to recognize it by scent before, but she starts to recognize it _instantly_ , this specific bitter burn that never fails to ratchet the fury in Hayden’s chest up higher. 

“Do you even know what _happened_ to Tracy’s and Josh’s bodies after you left them to rot in the sewers?!” She shrieks at him one day. Thank _christ_ Val is gone, or their whole ridiculous house of cards would come tumbling down. 

Theo doesn’t respond, just stares at her wide-eyed and frozen, and Hayden nearly screams at him about the graves she and Liam and Scott and Mason and the rest of the McCall pack had helped Corey dig out in the Preserve, before abruptly clamping her mouth shut; refusing to turn them or Corey or the memory of the carefully-stacked cairns Corey had created into weapons. Instead she storms out of the house and doesn’t come back until Val texts her, wondering where the hell she is and asking if Theo had picked up a late-night shift or something; where the hell was he? 

Hayden feels a spike of panic when Val asks that, but Theo’s back the next morning, bags under his eyes even with his healing and the smell of pine and wet dirt soaked into his skin. 

He smells more like wolf than he usually does, too, these thick black hairs clinging to the hoodie he’d thrown on in deference to the chill spring air, and Hayden spends a long few seconds staring at the subtle shaking of his hands in his hoodie’s pocket when he first walks back in before flicking her gaze up to his. He’s making some excuse to Val, _last minute overtime opportunity_ , and maybe Val believes it and maybe she doesn’t, but she doesn’t call him on it. And—and neither does _Hayden_ ; she just looks away, and goes back to the reading she hadn’t managed to focus on enough to do last night, and doesn’t say a word. 

She also doesn’t _apologize_ —not that she needs to apologize for the _truth_ , regardless of her tone—but the thing is… _But the thing is_ , neither does Theo, either that day or ever. 

He never apologizes—not for anything that matters, anyway, not for _the_ only things that matter—and it’s…one of the reasons Hayden can’t be as angry with him as she’d like.

But she does still get angry, and Theo knows she gets angry—and more importantly knows _why_ she gets angry—and he always tones it down, after. His smiles become a little less wide, his stories a little less long, and less clever, and he disappears into the basement faster, and more quickly, in the days afterwards. It never lasts: Val’s careful coaxing or Theo’s own helpless habits or the way that Theo’s scent has so settled into the house that Hayden doesn’t even notice it, anymore, doesn’t even register it, draw it—draw _him_ —back out. 

But it does happen.

Val stares thoughtfully after him the second or third time it does, sat at the kitchen table with Hayden and having acknowledged Theo’s flimsy _wiped-from-work_ excuse with a dismissive hand-wave, and then she turns to stare thoughtfully at Hayden instead. Hayden just keeps picking at her plate, appetite suddenly gone, and pretends she doesn’t notice Val’s attention from less than three feet away; pretends she can’t hear Theo’s pulse from a little farther.

“So you two weren’t just passing acquaintances at Beacon Hills,” Val finally summarizes, and there _could_ be a question mark at that end of her sentence, but there isn’t; Hayden sighs.

“It wasn’t like that,” She mutters, responding to the most obvious insinuation because it’s the easiest, and also because it _wasn’t_.

Val just hums and looks back at the basement door. “But it was like _something_ ,” She eventually concludes, giving Hayden the _it wasn’t like that_ but not the whole denial.

Hayden swallows, and darts a glance at the basement door, too. Unless he deliberately acts to avoid it, Theo can hear every word spoken in the house—they both can—and Hayden wonders if he’s downstairs with headphones on, or hurrying to get in the shower to get his head and ears closer to the dull roaring fall of the water, or… Or if he’s leaned up against a wall halfway down the steps, head tilted up and out as he listens, or sat on his rescued futon with his head in his hands as he _listens_. 

Hayden doesn’t bother sharpening her own hearing to check.

“It was like something,” She agrees, and leaves it at that.

\---

“Were you in love with Liam?”

The words just come spilling out of Hayden’s mouth one day as she’s sat at the kitchen table, half doing homework and half watching Theo as he purposefully crumples a set of crisp new twenty dollar bills in his hands, softening them up and wrinkling them about before he folds them messily and slides them carefully into the right pocket of Val’s coat, where she always absently tucks her spare change. The first time Hayden had seen him doing something similar she’d screamed _what the hell do you think you’re doing_ , reflexively golden-eyed and furious until she’d realized he was sliding money _into_ and not _out of_ Val’s wallet. 

They’d stared at each other in a heavy, frozen silence for a few seconds, and then Hayden had abruptly blinked away the shift and told him, “She’s a cop. She’s going to notice money magically appearing in her wallet.” 

Theo hadn’t moved for a few seconds longer, and then he’d frowned down at Val’s wallet still in his hands, and had taken the twenties back out. Hayden had found them folded under the little bowl on the table by the front door where Val always leaves her keys, later, hidden in and among the other beat-up old bills that Val had pulled out of her pocket and dropped there. 

Looking down at them, Hayden had hovered careful fingertips over them, and then left them where they were.

Now, she watches in petty amusement as Theo jerks at her sudden, unexpected question and knocks over the scented candle that Hayden had impulse bought at Target one time, _also_ on the little table by the front door, and just to the right of Val’s hanging coat. He catches it before it can hit the ground and shatter, and darts a glance back at her as he replaces it on the table, taking an unnecessary amount of care to ensure that he situates it back in the exact same place it had been. Hayden’s ninety percent sure that he’s doing it to waste time, like if he lets her absent question go acknowledged long enough Hayden will forget she asked it, but it has the opposite effect; Hayden feels her teeth grit.

“Well?” She demands, her attention now fully on him as he pulls his hands back from the candle, apparently done obsessively positioning it.

“Well, what?” He mutters, but he sounds petulant about it, not distracted; he’d heard her.

“Were you in love with Liam?” Hayden snaps mercilessly, her senses sharpening and sharpening as she narrows her eyes, already fixed intently on his face, and as she counts off the rhythm of his pulse, the quick way his heart beats _ba-dum, ba-dum_ against his ribcage. 

The line of Theo’s mouth tightens, and he doesn’t answer for a few seconds. And then he abruptly turns around to put his back to the little table, his hands coming up to clutch at the edge of it on either side of his hips; Hayden can see the whiteness of his knuckles. “Were _you_ in love with Liam?” He spits back, clearly looking to wound; to scratch at the still-festering place where Hayden’s memories of Liam live.

It works; Hayden scowls, and surges to her feet, snatching the bowl of trail mix she’d been absently eating and bringing it over to the sink as she snaps, “Yes,” clipped and furious.

She thinks that’ll be the end of it; she asked a dumb question and Theo responded in kind, and now that their hackles are both up—now that they’ve both lashed out at the other—they’ll be able to slink off back to their respective corners and let it go. Except that it’s _Theo_ ; Theo the infiltrator, Theo the _spy_ , and it’s ingrained him to pick, and to pry. 

“So why’d you leave?” She hears him ask from behind her, the razor’s edge to his tone gone and replaced by a well-worn sort of curiosity; this isn’t the first time he’s wondered this, she realizes. It’s just the first time he’s _asked her_ about it.

“Because it didn’t matter!” Hayden yells, slamming the bowl in her hands down into the sink. She’d done it harder than she’d meant to—harder than she’d realized she was—and the bowl cracks into a half-dozen sharp pieces at the impact, spilling nuts and raisins and incongruously bright pieces of chocolate candy out across the stretch of the sink; Hayden blinks down at the mess, surprised.

Then she blinks again when Theo’s hands suddenly appear in her vision, reaching forward for her own and pulling them up to turn them carefully over. Hayden jerks to look up at Theo beside her but Theo isn’t looking at her, his attention on her palms as he brushes a thumb over the already-closing puncture stabbed through her left one, though the blood’s still running thick and red. 

“Sorry,” He mutters after a few seconds, eyes downcast and expression pinched, and Hayden’s not sure if he’s apologizing for his prying or her injury or the way his fingers are still wrapped around hers, her blood staining both of their knuckles. Maybe for all three. 

Maybe for something else.

But whatever it’s for, it’s the last scratch at the single remaining thread of Hayden’s defenses, of her better sense, and she stares up at him as she feels that thread snap; as she feels that dam break. 

“Val can’t heal like this,” She tells him hoarsely.

She flexes her fingers in his grip, the puncture already healed underneath the wet sheen of blood, like the damage had been a convincing fake; a stage injury; a dramatic prop. Theo’s fingers spasm around hers and he flicks his attention from her palm to her eyes, his jaw clenching.

“And—and even if she _could_ ,” Hayden finds herself continuing, “she couldn’t…she _couldn’t—_ ” 

_Heal from having to bury me_ , Hayden concludes, the words getting stuck in the tight clench of her throat. She blinks rapidly several times and pulls her hands out of Theo’s, turning to face the sink head-on as she turns on the water to briskly wash the blood off her palms before starting to carefully pick out the pieces of broken bowl, setting them on the counter to the side of the sink, one by one. 

But she only manages two pieces before Theo is laying his hands over hers, stilling them. Hayden snaps her gaze up to his.

“Here,” He murmurs, and presses his shoulder against hers, gently encouraging her to the side. “Let me.”

He doesn’t say _please_ but his shoulders hunch in as he takes over picking out the broken porcelain, as he starts scooping the now soggy spilled trail mix into the garbage disposal. Her blood is still painted stark-red against and between his fingers and Hayden finds herself staring at it, a little mesmerized as she watches him finish scraping the sink clean before flicking the garbage disposal on, turning on the water a half-second later to let it run; to hold his hands underneath it, the flow of it running briefly pink.

He has to lean away to get his hands on the dish towel hanging over the oven once he’s done, and Hayden thinks _that’s_ going to be the end of it; that he’ll dry his hands, and gather up the pieces of broken bowl to take them out to the trash, and they won’t talk about this again. And Theo certainly _starts_ that process, unfolding the dish towel over one hand and then reaching forward with the other to start loading the pieces of broken porcelain into it, bit by careful bit. He even makes it all the way to the front door with his little bundle, Hayden still stood rooted to the floor in the kitchen, before he stops. Hayden’s eyes flick instantly to his back, to the tense line of his shoulders, and she finds herself holding her breath as she waits, and waits.

“Well, there you go. There’s your answer,” He finally tells the wood of the front door, just loud enough to be heard, and then he opens the door with a jerk and steps out quickly, all but slamming it behind him.

Hayden’s confused until she realizes that he hadn’t meant it as a response to her helpless confession about Val, but to some amalgamation of her first question and his second, topped off by Hayden’s torn-out response. _Were you in love with Liam_ and _so why’d you leave_ , and Hayden hadn’t even known she’d been asking Theo the latter, too, but _Theo_ had, and then he’d said: _there you go_. He’d said: _there’s your answer_. 

He’d given her own answer right back to her: _because it didn’t matter_. 

Hayden stands and stares after him, and then jumps hard enough to bang her hip on the counter when she hears the distinctive creak of Theo’s truck door opening, the sudden dull roar of his engine starting up. Hip stinging, she swallows against a sudden fierce burn in her eyes, and then rips her attention from the closed door back down to the sink. 

There’s still a streak of her blood left on the side of the metal; Hayden flicks on the faucet, and washes it away. 

\---

The first time they fuck, it is absolutely, one-hundred percent Hayden’s fault.

She’s running late for school but if she tries to drive there without refilling her windshield wiper fluid in the disgusting, sleeting _sludge_ falling from the sky, she’s going to crash into a telephone pole and die. But she can’t find the new bottle that she _knows_ Val had just bought anywhere, and so she’s annoyed in addition to completely distracted as she hustles down the stairs into the basement already yelling, “Theo, where in the hell did you put the windshield wiper fluid, it’s not—”

And then she nearly puts herself through the wall at the bottom of the stairs as she trips over her own feet, because Theo is standing in the middle of the room very, very naked. 

He yelps and drops the towel he’d been using to dry his hair down to cover his cock hanging soft between his legs, but the damage is done. Hayden stares at where his hand is now clutching the towel in front of himself, her elbow absently smarting from its collision with the wall but her brain just one absolute _blank_. Or _mostly_ one absolute blank, except for the part that’s somehow still able to think _wow, he also has really nice hands_ —long-fingered but with thick, strong-looking knuckles—like a complete _psychopath_. 

“ _Hayden!_ ” Theo eventually shrills, after a long few seconds where Hayden doesn’t look away or otherwise move or really even _breathe_.

“Oh! Oh, oh jesus, I’m sorry—I’m, I’m so sorry,” Hayden stutters, her face now _flaming_ , her eyes jerking reflexively up to his face—which really doesn’t _help_ , because it means they drag right up over his bare chest as they go—and then she turns and flees back up the stairs without another word.

She also immediately gets in her car and drives to school without refilling her windshield wiper fluid, and does in fact almost crash into a telephone pole and die more than once. That might have more to do with—what she’d just seen, though, and less to do with the weather, which continues to spit disgusting, icy sleet the whole way there. 

But finally she somewhat miraculously makes it to the school parking lot and into a spot without injury either to herself, anyone else, or anyone else’s property. She’s just in the process of reaching for her bag to step out of her car—and grim-facedly shoving aside all memories of Theo’s cock, or the shadowed planes of his abdomen, or the way she now has definitive proof that he’d put back on most of the weight he’d lost—when her phone vibrates in her bag’s side pocket. 

There’s no one around to see it but Hayden’s face still flames for the second time that day, and she nearly fumbles her phone out of her bag in her haste to check it. _The windshield wiper fluid was in the hallway closet_ , Theo’s text reads, but as Hayden watches the little _dot-dot-dot_ of Theo typing something else pops up. 

She waits, but nothing comes through, and eventually she hears the bell ring from inside the building and she has to shove her phone back into her bag and sprint to class, swearing all the while and getting covered in a disgusting layer of dampness as she goes. She doesn’t get a chance to check it again until later—or so she tells herself, her phone buried resolutely in the bottom of her bag and forgotten about, as best she’s able—but when she comes back out to go get lunch, there’s an empty bottle of windshield wiper fluid sitting innocuously on her passenger seat. Hayden frowns at it through her still-closed car door for a moment, but the weather is still horrendous and eventually the uncomfortable wet feeling at the back of her collar drives her to unlock her car and retreat inside.

 _You didn’t have to do that_ , she texts Theo a minute or so later, after she’s confirmed her suspicions by flicking the lever by her steering wheel and watching as the car’s internal mechanics send blue-tinted fluid fountaining dutifully over her windshield.

 _You’re welcome_ , Theo sends back almost immediately, and Hayden forces herself to make a face at her phone—interpreting a sarcastic tone to his message because she can’t handle there being anything else—and then she sticks her keys in the ignition, and goes to get lunch. 

Val’s there when she gets home later but on her way out, shoveling pasta into her mouth that either she or Theo made—Hayden has her suspicions as to who—as she gets ready to head to the station. She sees Hayden walk in and immediately starts trying to talk to her, though with her chipmunk cheeks it comes out a garbled mess; Hayden raises her eyebrows and concentrates on lifting her bag’s strap over her head, letting it fall next to her boots as she heels them off.

“ _Hmm, hmm_ , jesus, okay,” Val finally manages, humming around and then eventually swallowing the mass of pasta she’d been trying to talk around. “I picked up Kernan’s morning shift as a favor to him so I’m working a double now. I won’t be back until after noon tomorrow, probably.”

“Okay,” Hayden acknowledges, then: “You want me to bring you lunch?”

Val shakes her head. “Kernan’s bringing it as thanks, but I appreciate the offer,” She drops the bowl she’d been eating out of in the sink and then hurries for the front door, grabbing her keys—and the crumpled wad of bills stashed nearby—before shrugging into her jacket. Hayden stands still so that Val can kiss her cheek on the way out, Val tossing a _bye, Theo_ , over her shoulder as she lets the front door slam shut behind her.

Hayden glances over at him as Theo echoes Val’s _bye_ , but he’s on the couch with his back to her as he watches TV, and Hayden can’t see anything but the back of his head. Still, she feels her face heat as even _that_ sight dredges up the memory of seeing him this morning fresh from the shower, and Hayden bites back a frustrated groan and makes a sharp turn, heading for her bedroom so she can change out of her damp-and-then-dry-and-then-damp-again clothes.

When she comes back out in sweats and a simple cotton shirt Theo is still on the couch, though it looks—from Hayden’s admittedly imperfect vantage point as she heads to the kitchen—like he’s sunk even lower into it, his shoulders hunching in. For a moment Hayden considers feigning homework or exhaustion or _something_ so that she can take the bowl she fills with pasta from the pot still on the stove back into her room, but then she thinks of the empty bottle of windshield wiper fluid that she’d ended up tossing in the school’s recycling after she got back from lunch so it’d stop rolling around her car, and doesn’t.

Theo startles when she drops down next to him on the couch, like he’d maybe been concentrating hard enough on pretending he hadn’t been aware of her that he’d actually turned it into truth. His fingers go white-knuckled around the bowl he still has in his lap, but when Hayden reflexively flares her nostrils—a little helplessly curious—all she smells is the chemical sting of the cheap—though not unpleasant—body wash Theo favors; he’d showered after work, clearly. Giving up on the whole effort—and pointedly telling herself that she’s _not_ disappointed—Hayden forces herself to focus on the TV and then snorts.

“Law and Order, really?” She comments dryly, tipping her head sideways on the back of the couch to eye him skeptically. “I’m surprised Val let you put this on. The blatant disregard for police procedure usually sends her up the wall.”

“She’s the one who _put it_ _on_ ,” Theo mutters in reply, but his fingers also relax, slowly, as do his rounded shoulders.

Hayden spends the rest of the episode making purposefully bad guesses as to who the murderer is, primarily because every time she does Theo makes a face and bites his tongue a little harder, clearly having figured out the entire plot already, and his benign irritation with her overplayed obtuseness is frankly one of the funniest things she’s seen all day. He loses it right around the big reveal, when Hayden talks over Detective Whoever-It-Is having the big lightbulb moment to gasp, “The milk carton lady! It has to be!”

“You’re the _worst_ ,” Theo complains, now trying to smother Hayden with a throw pillow he’d retrieved from the side of the couch; thankfully they’d both put their bowls on the coffee table already, or the cushions would be covered with tomato sauce stains.

Hayden bats away the pillow easily enough, laughing, but stays flopped back on the couch where she’d retreated as Theo rolls himself to his feet and gathers both their sets of dishes, then heads for the sink. Arching back a little so that she can watch his progress, Hayden bites her lip and then, after another moment of hesitation, gets to her feet as well so she can follow him into the kitchen.

“Hey,” She says quietly when she’s close enough, reaching down to take over rinsing out their bowls; Theo gives her a questioning look but moves obediently to the side, where he can accept the dishes Hayden hands him one by one and slot them into the dishwasher. “I wanted to say thanks, for earlier.”

Theo looks surprised for a second and then his lips flicker in a smarmy smirk, and Hayden’s confused for a moment until she _isn’t_. “I meant for my _car_ , you jackass!” She all but shrieks, deliberately flicking her dripping hands at him.

“Hey!” He protests, nearly jumping back out of the way before he seems to realize doing so will send him tripping over the open dishwasher door. He glances down at his now wet-spackled shirt and then back up at her, glaring; Hayden just returns his smirk.

But now that he’s brought it back _up_ , Hayden can’t stop thinking about it; can’t stop seeing him as he had been earlier, unintentionally on display with one arm bent to dry his hair with the towel in his hand, the rest of him just one long line of bare skin. And the second she thinks about it, she can see Theo _realize_ she’s thinking about it, his nostrils flaring and his cheeks flushing. He blinks rapidly and looks away, giving way more attention to closing the dishwasher door than the simple action really deserves; Hayden turns back to the sink and then curses as she sees the still-running water, and reaches forward to quickly shut it off. 

They stand there in awkward silence for a few seconds, each of them clearly trying to figure out how to play the situation off. Except—except there’s a part of Hayden—a part that reminds her of Malia, sometimes, or of Lydia—that’s asking _why_. That’d spent the day insistently shoving memories to the forefront of Hayden’s mind, and not even _just_ the memory of Theo naked, but of the rest of it, too. The first time Theo had made Val laugh so hard that her giggles had gone _silent_ , Val gasping for air with tears streaming down her face. The first time Theo had cooked, unasked for and clearly afraid the action would be unwelcome, and the small, startled quirk to his lips when both Val and Hayden had fell on the food like starving hyenas; like neither of them had eaten for days, rather than a few hours.

The first time Theo had tricked Val into unknowingly accepting his carefully hidden cash, Val blinking down at the bills she’d pulled out of her jacket pocket and the pinched lines of her face smoothing out some as she’d let out a curious _huh_ and then shrugged, accepting the benign, Occam’s Razor explanation that she’d forgotten about them instead of anything suspicious; Theo’s tense shoulders hadn’t relaxed until she’d left, yelling at Hayden and Theo to text her if they wanted anything specific from the grocery store.

And it’s _that part_ of herself that opens up Hayden’s mouth, her eyes still fixed on the glimmering wet of the metal of the sink, and moves her tongue and throat to say, “We could, you know.”

She looks up into the reflection of the window over the counter after she’s said it, and finds Theo staring wide-eyed back at her, his mouth dropped softly open. Jaw clenching, Hayden turns around so that they’re looking at each other head-on, and tips her chin up, just a little; just enough.

“We _could_ ,” She insists, and brings her hands up to clutch at the edge of the counter at her sides to hide the fact—either from Theo, or from herself—that they’re shaking. “It’s not like we’re—” _committed_ , she was going to say, _it’s not like we’re committed to anyone else_ , Liam flashing before her eyes, but abruptly she swallows that down and says instead, “It’s not like we _owe_ anyone anything.”

Theo still isn’t saying anything but his _body_ is, his shoulders starting to rise and fall more rapidly as his breathing, his pulse—both of them pounding in Hayden’s ears—start to speed. Hayden meets his eyes—his _dilated_ eyes—and waits, her fingers going tight and then tighter around the counter’s edge as his nostrils flare wide and then wider again.

“I—I don’t…” Theo stammers, eventually, and Hayden can almost _see_ him retreating back into the shell he’d been wearing when she’d first found him at that warehouse, exhausted and thin and about to _flee town_ because Hayden had found out he’d been in it. She swallows, a sharp twinge in her chest twisting away some of the arousal that’d been pooling in her gut, and Hayden blinks a few times, forcing her gaze down and away from his.

“Okay,” She agrees levelly, clamping down on her disappointment, and pushes off the counter, _now_ ready to retreat to her bedroom, where she could spend the rest of the night resigning herself to the rejection and then wake up tomorrow prepared to _leave it alone_.

But she only makes it a few steps before she’s yanked to an ungentle stop.

When she looks back at Theo he’s looking down at his hand on her wrist like he doesn’t recognize it, but he jerks his gaze up to hers quickly enough. His throat bobs as he swallows, and Hayden doesn’t know how to read the scents coming off his skin but she knows how to read the subtle shaking of his fingers around her wrist, the uncertain angle of his shoulders.

“You—” He starts, and then stops. Hayden almost prompts him after a few long, dragging seconds but then doesn’t, and she leaves her wrist where it is; in the circle of his fingers, where he can feel the tell-tale beat of her pulse against them. Theo stares at her, his eyes searching her face, and then he finally manages, “You—you’re _sure_ …?”

Hayden nearly says _yes_ , immediate and a little brash, but then she stops. She stops and really forces herself to _think_ —think like Theo is apparently forcing _himself_ to think—and then she shrugs, though carefully enough that it won’t dislodge his fingers around her wrist.

“No,” She tells him honestly. “But who ever really is? And I know what I—”

 _Want_. She’d been about to say _want_ , but it gets swallowed up by Theo’s mouth as he suddenly releases her wrist to surge into her, his hands coming up to hold her face as they collide, and not altogether gently. Hayden gasps in surprise and then moans into the kiss, tilting her head for the better angle as Theo presses harder up against her. It drives them both back another step, which drives Hayden’s back right into the kitchen wall, and she arcs up against it when she feels the impact, her hands seeking out and then grasping at Theo’s hips to pull him closer in against herself. 

It isn’t long after that that Theo groans and drops his hands away from her face to her hips, pulling her off the wall and then angling her slightly as he starts to walk her back, out of the kitchen and towards—towards the _couch_. Hayden reluctantly rips her mouth free and presses her hands to his shoulders, gasping, “Wait.”

She immediately has to turn that press into a clumsy grab as Theo instantly tries to jump back from her, his hands flying away from her hips.

“No, _no_ ,” She denies, pulling him back in. “Not _wait_ , wait,” She explains nonsensically, her hands probably wound _too_ tight in his shirt, to be honest, but she doesn’t let go. “Just _wait_ as in not the couch.” She grimaces, and meets his confused eyes as she says, “Val. She’d _know_.”

Theo pales as he apparently considers this, and then he nods a little frantically and moves away again. Hayden’s about to protest a second time when he grabs her wrist again and starts pulling, and she swallows it down as he heads—dragging her with him—towards the basement door.

There’s not a whole lot of finesse involved, once they finish stumbling their way down the stairs.

Theo pauses once to shove her up against the wall at the bottom—the same place Hayden had fallen into after she’d caught her glance of him—and kiss her hard, his hips pinning hers to the wall and giving these seemingly helpless little jerks, but he yanks her off almost as quickly to continue dragging her to his futon. Hayden goes, just as desperate, her fingers reaching forward to drag their way up, up the thick muscles of his back until Theo groans, and reaches down to strip his own shirt off before turning to do the same for hers.

It doesn’t take Hayden long to realize—once they’re both naked and laid out flat on the futon, Theo between her legs—that for all Hayden’s genuinely-meant assurances earlier, there’s a ghost in the room with them. She recognizes it in _herself_ , first; in the way that she runs her fingers over every inch of Theo’s skin that she can reach, cataloguing and categorizing and _comparing_ , she realizes, because for all his bulk Theo is leaner than Liam ever was. It’s a function of height, she thinks, the analysis automatic and _helpless_ as she scratches her fingers back up Theo’s spine to his hair, clutching and clutching as he kisses her; as he grinds his hard cock down against the center of her, Hayden bringing her legs up to wrap tight and then tighter around his waist.

And she’s not the only one being haunted, apparently; Theo keeps dragging his lips away from her mouth to her jaw, her throat; her shoulders. Hayden shudders as she realizes what he’s doing and tangles her fingers in his hair, drawing his head up and over until it’s positioned right over the ridge of her left collarbone.

“Here,” She tells him, gasping. “Here, he’d always—”

She doesn’t get a chance to finish; Theo whines, loud and a little hurt-sounding, and opens his mouth over the bone, biting _down_ just like Liam always used to. Hayden gasps and arches up against him as arousal _surges_ through her, and Theo rides it out with her, keeping his teeth locked around her collarbone as he grinds even harder down against her.

“Please,” He whispers, when she’s collapsed, panting, back down. He lifts his head back up to bury it against the side of her neck. “Hayden, _please_.”

And so Hayden reaches down, and takes him in hand, and guides him inside of her.

It’s quick, and a little clumsy, one or both of them constantly losing the rhythm of their hips as Theo grinds _just right_ against her, or Hayden deliberately tightens around him, but it’s also, somehow, exactly what it should be. Hayden keeps her fingers clenched tight around the rippling muscles of his back—so alike and yet so _un_ alike the feel of Liam’s—and Theo keeps dropping his mouth away from her own, away from her neck, and back to the space on her collarbone that she’d led him to, biting and sucking marks that heal almost as fast as he creates them.

He fastens his teeth back around it as he comes, his hips pressed flush up against hers and the tips of Hayden’s too-sharp fingernails pricking at the curves of his shoulders as she gasps, and shudders, and comes, too.

Hayden’s almost expecting him to pull away quickly, after they both finish catching their breaths, but he doesn’t. Instead he stays pressed up against and blanketing her for half a minute or so, his forehead dropped against her shoulder and his breath fanning out against the skin of her collarbone that he’d been worrying at, and Hayden finds herself dragging her fingertips—now back to being fully blunt—around his back in nonsense, meaningless patterns as she tips her head back and just breathes, too.

Finally Theo presses a light, warning hand against the side of her hip and Hayden nods. Theo must feel it against the side of his own head, because he presses a little harder as he pulls out, steadying her through her reflexive little jerk as her still-sensitive muscles sing. He flops down next to her on his back after, his eyes closing as his chest continues to heave, and Hayden tips her head so she can watch him for a few seconds before turning her face back up towards the ceiling, too.

The silence drags but it’s not uncomfortable. Or at least it’s not uncomfortable for _Hayden_ , but after a few minutes she recognizes a certain tenseness to Theo’s frame next to her and she glances over, her brow furrowing. At first her heart sinks because she thinks he looks _regretful_ , all rigid muscles and shivering tension, but then she catches sight of his twitching fingertips—twitching _towards_ her—and she feels a bloom of intuition flare hot in her gut.

Kicking a foot out, she catches him in the ankle and then rolls a bit to curl up just slightly against his side. “Okay, it’s freezing down here. I can see why you keep filching all the blankets from upstairs.”

Theo freezes at first, even his twitching fingers going still, but when Hayden doesn’t move or otherwise react like he’s at all acting weird, the tension slowly starts to leak out of him. After a moment he turns his face against hers, pressing his nose to her cheek as he mutters, “I didn’t filch _all_ the blankets, you’re exaggerating.”

“And you’re splitting hairs,” Hayden counters, a little sleepily as her eyelids start to droop. “You left _one_ blanket, did you seriously think we didn’t notice?”

Theo laughs a little against her skin, his breath skating across her cheek and making Hayden shiver, but he still doesn’t reach for her. Hayden’s about to take the cue she _thinks_ he’s giving her and roll away, stand up to gather her clothes and head back upstairs, when she feels the shift of Theo’s jaw against her own; Theo biting his lip. She waits.

“Val’s working a double, right?” He suddenly blurts out, all in a rush; Hayden resists the urge to open her eyes and look up at him, instead humming thoughtfully.

“Yeah,” She agrees, even though she _knows_ Theo knows that; he’d been sitting right there on the couch when Val had told Hayden. 

It’s how she knows that he’s not really asking; that he’s trying to give her a guilt-free excuse to get up, and leave, without having to come up with some kind of mealy-mouthed explanation. 

So instead of pointing that out, or taking him up on his offer, Hayden burrows a little more against his side. “You picked up an early shift for tomorrow, didn’t you?”

“Time and half,” Theo replies, like some kind of foolproof invocation against Val’s pinched-mouth glare at him for choosing to work on weekends; Hayden just hums again.

“Well, pile on your ridiculous horde of blankets and then wake me up when you get ready to leave, yeah?” Hayden orders him around a huge, jaw-cracking yawn. “That way I can get back upstairs to collapse into my own bed before Val gets home.”

Theo hesitates for a second, and then two, and then three, and then he says, “Okay,” very quietly, and sits up to reach for the truly ridiculous pile of blankets he does in fact have kicked down at the bottom of the futon. He pulls them up one by one, carefully settling them over Hayden’s shoulders, and then he slowly lays back down next to her, sliding underneath them with exaggerated care as he apparently tries not to dislodge them from around her. 

He also lays back down _flat_ , with a few inches left between them, and Hayden smothers a frustrated noise and just turns over onto her side, scooting back against him some as she does. Theo doesn’t react for a handful of seconds and then he _does,_ slowly turning over onto his side and pressing against her degree by careful degree, like he’s waiting at every step for Hayden to snap at him, or push him away. But finally he winds up pressed up flush to her back, and Hayden feels something twist in her chest as he shudders, apparently helpless to stop it. 

Pretending she didn’t notice, Hayden just reaches back and pats around until she can find his hand, and then she drags it forward, over her hip and around her. She goes to release it, after that, something in her brain guessing at where Theo’s line of _too much_ might be, but she can’t; Theo threads his fingers through hers and squeezes, gently.

“Night, Hayden,” He breathes eventually, when she doesn’t object, his voice still a hesitant sort of testing; another proverbial toe dipped in the water.

Hayden just presses back a little more firmly against him, and pulls his arm a little more tightly around her, and replies, “Night, Theo,” as she lets her eyes slip shut.

\---

The second time they fuck is all on Theo.

It’s a few days later, and while the intervening time hasn’t exactly been _awkward_ , it’s been _something_ , and Hayden doesn’t know what that something is. She _does_ know that they haven’t talked about what happened, and haven’t even talked about talking about what happened, and the result is an unintentional return to the way they’d behaved around each other when Val first browbeat Theo into accepting their help: carefully tiptoeing around the other while pretending—poorly—that absolutely nothing is wrong.

Thank god Val seems to interpret it as one of Hayden’s infrequent bouts of anger—a flare-up of that unidentified _it was like something_ that she and Hayden had discussed—and Hayden does nothing to disabuse her of that notion. Neither does Theo, for that matter; he doesn’t go back to hiding in the basement, like he used to, but he treats Hayden gingerly, like he’s waiting and waiting for the consequences of their actions that _must be_ delayed in coming to arrive; like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Like he’s waiting for Hayden to realize some mistake she’d made.

And there’s a part of Hayden that _does_ try and insist that she made some kind of mistake. That the whole cascading series of events that had started with her tripping down the stairs after accidentally seeing him naked and had concluded with the two of them curled up together under nearly every blanket Hayden and Val own, had been some kind of cosmic fluke; a slice of time slipping out of alignment with the rest of the universe, but _over_ now. 

The problem is Hayden doesn’t _believe_ that part of herself. 

She nearly tells Theo that a half dozen times. Nearly corners him in the kitchen again, when he’s awkwardly trying to dance out of her way after a painfully stilted dinner. Nearly stands over him when he’s hunched low on the couch, clearly trying it keep up appearances for Val but just as clearly desperate to be anywhere else. 

Nearly tells him the time they almost collide in the driveway as he’s coming in from an overnight shift and she’s heading out for school, Hayden distracted and Theo exhausted and neither of them looking where they’re going. _We could, and we did, and we could again_ , Hayden thinks, but doesn’t say, staring shocked up at him with Theo’s hands on her arms where he’d snapped them up to keep them from running into each other, Theo’s eyes equally wide as he stares down at her. 

But the words jam up in her throat, and eventually Theo lets her go, and they go right back to the odd, uncomfortable stalemate of their current situation. 

Hayden doesn’t know what to do about any of it. She’s at least fifty percent of the problem and so theoretically she could solve at least half of it, but she can’t seem to sort out her own head anymore than she can sort out Theo’s, and so she—doesn’t. Instead she maneuvers around Theo as delicately as he maneuvers around her, and ignores Val’s squinting, curious attention, and tries not to think about it. Tries not to think about _any_ of it.

It doesn’t work, of course, and after Val leaves for work—another double, though officially scheduled this time, rather than voluntarily assumed—Hayden gives up on politely pretending she can handle being in the same room as Theo, and mutters something about homework as she retreats to her room. She can feel Theo’s eyes on her back as she goes, and she nearly turns around to catch them, abruptly sick to death of the way that the only time he’ll seem to look directly at her now is when he can deny ever having done it. 

And then she remembers the slow, careful way he’d wrapped himself around her a few days ago, and—doesn’t.

Her attempts to distract herself with the homework she does in fact have last exactly as long as it takes her to realize that she’s been reading the same textbook page over and over for nearly ten minutes, and then she gives up—quite literally throwing her hands up in the air, before she rakes them irritatedly down her face—and stuffs her books back into her bag, and goes to bed early.

But sometime later she startles awake, bleary-eyed and confused until she rolls over and sees Theo hovering uncertainly in her doorway.

“Theo?” She croaks, squinting at him, and Theo flinches like she’d screamed it.

“Shit, _sorry_ ,” He hisses, jerking back a step, and it’s only then that Hayden realizes he’d had a hand raised, the fingers curled into a fist; he’d been about to knock. “Sorry, this wasn’t…I didn’t mean—”

But Hayden will likely never know what he _didn’t mean_ , because his cheeks flush even deeper, and he whirls around, clearly about to retreat. Clearly about to _run the hell away_ , and suddenly Hayden can’t handle it.

“For christ’s sake, Theo, would you just—!” Hayden snaps, throwing back her blankets and throwing _herself_ out of bed as she lunges for his wrist, dragging _him_ to a stop in an unexpected reversal of roles.

Except almost immediately the flare of annoyance in her chest dims and dies, because the skin under her hand is _freezing_. She tightens her grip reflexively and looks up from where her eyes had instinctively fallen down to stare at his wrist in surprise, but Theo only meets her wide-eyed gaze for a second before jerking his attention elsewhere. He also rotates his wrist in her grip, but doesn’t break it. 

“Theo, what…?” Hayden breathes, and reaches forward with her other hand, swiveling her grip around and down so that she’s cradling his palm and fingers between her own. The stretch of his palm, the length of his fingers, are just as cold as his wrist had been—more so, maybe—and even as Theo resolutely continues looking anywhere but at her, he _shudders_ as she presses more and more of her skin to his, like she could press her own warmth into him.

“I don’t—I don’t know,” He eventually confesses, and there’s an exhausted thickness to his voice; a helpless rawness so out of step with his usual arrogant front that Hayden finds herself stepping closer automatically. Theo’s eyes dart to her as she does, and then away again. “It just happens sometimes, now. Ever since—ever since…”

 _The skinwalker prison_ , Hayden realizes. She’d never really understood the mechanics of it and no one had ever bothered to explain them to her—probably because they didn’t understand them, either—but she remembers the conversation Liam had relayed to her, Liam and Theo in the hospital with the Ghost Riders and _what do you think I was doing down there?_

And whatever it was he’d been doing—or having _done_ to him—a part of it seemed to have followed him up _here_. Hayden can’t help but stare as several memories realign themselves one after the other after the other inside her head: Theo’s dragon-horde of stolen blankets; his constant favoring of long-sleeved shirts and sweatshirts, even as the weather had gotten progressively warmer; the way he always has his heat _blasting_ in his truck cab, now that she’s thinking about it, the inside of it always sweltering the few times Hayden’s ridden in it for whatever reason. 

The way he’d shiver, and shake, more than she’d ever remembered him doing in that ever-amorphous _before_ , his trembling hands and trembling lips and trembling shoulders, all of which Hayden had written off as symptoms of _nerves_ or _guilt_ or _something_ , and she’d been more right than she’d known, but she’d also been—wrong.

But Theo’s sharp eyes catch whatever must be on her face as she thinks all that and _now_ he twists free of her grip, taking another step back.

“I’m sorry,” He repeats, more firmly this time. “I don’t know what I was thinking, I don’t—”

But Hayden just reaches out and catches him, snapping, “Hey, don’t…!,” as she gets one hand back around his wrist, and the other wound in the hem of his shirt.

Theo stops retreating but doesn’t relax, his whole body one long line of rigid tension. His pulse is beating frantically against the fingers Hayden has wrapped around his wrist and the muscles of his stomach are tensing and easing, tensing and easing with his too-shallow breaths, and even if Hayden couldn’t feel either of those things she can _hear_ them, rasping against her eardrums and scratching at her spine. Hayden hesitates, for a moment, lip folding between her teeth, and then she slowly starts to pull him backwards, towards her bed.

It’s almost definitely what he’d originally wanted—the reason he’d been hovering in her doorway trying to work himself up to knocking—but she still only manages to encourage him stumbling forward for a few steps before he locks right back up again, dragging them both to a stop. 

“Hayden, no,” He tells her, frustration now creeping into his voice. “You don’t have to—”

“Yeah, I know I don’t _have_ to,” Hayden cuts him off, and this time when she pulls she gives up on politeness and _yanks_ , engaging more than a little of her supernatural strength to overcome the inertia of his rigid knees. 

Theo staggers forward another few steps and then scowls as he forces them to a stop again. “Look, I shouldn’t have come up. I can’t ask you to _—_ ”

But they’re only a few more feet from Hayden’s bed, so Hayden gives another yank and lets her knees collapse as they impact her mattress, sitting down heavily as she interrupts him to say, “Well, good thing I’m _offering_ , then.”

She sets her mouth mulishly as she looks up at him, her fingers still wrapped one set around his wrist and one set around his now stretched-out hem. Theo stares down at her, his still-freezing wrist twisting around and around in her grip.

And then all at once he shudders, and hard enough that his teeth clack together.

“Jesus, Theo,” Hayden breathes, and rockets reflexively back to her feet, reaching up for him.

He shudders harder as her fingers come around his face, his eyes squeezing shut and his hands coming up to circle her wrists. Every inch of his skin that Hayden can feel is cold, _brutally_ cold, and standing this close to him, now, she can actually _feel_ the coolness in the air between them, a distracting prickle against her own skin like walking outside into an unexpectedly chill day without a coat. 

“Sorry, sorry,” He pants miserably, and while he doesn’t shudder again he starts to shiver, constant and unstoppable and very nearly painful-looking. 

“Okay,” Hayden says, a little blankly. “Okay, here, we can—” She starts to maneuver him around and towards her bed—Theo apparently now too weak, or too distracted from the cold, to fight her on it—so that she can push him down, into the center of her sheets that are just starting to cool from her body heat.

For a moment she stands over him, torn and with her mind on the pile of blankets he’d collected downstairs, but there’s a part of her that’s absolutely _certain_ that if she leaves him alone right now, he’ll pull all the vulnerable parts of himself that he’d helplessly let spill out right back in, and be gone by the time she got back from retrieving them. So instead she pushes gently at his shoulders with her hands, and then nudges carefully at his hips with her knees, climbing up on the bed with him inch by inch until he scoots back enough that she can drag them both flat, and pull the covers back up over them both.

It’s _awful_ , at first; there’s no way for Hayden to straight-facedly lie about it.

Theo is just _so cold_. It emanates out from him, leeching all the heat out from the air around him and the sheets below him and _Hayden’s skin_ next to him, until Hayden’s shivering helplessly right along with him. He tries to pull away, when he realizes; tries to roll away and scramble weakly for the other side of the bed, but Hayden yanks him to a stop. More to the point she presses _herself_ up to his back, teeth gritting at the first icy touch and determinedly slotting her knees in behind his; trapping his frigid feet in between her own.

“Hayden,” Theo manages between his clacking teeth, her name just a weak protest, but Hayden just shakes her head against the back of his neck and then presses the tip of her freezing nose there, just silently holding on. Theo goes rigid, for a few seconds—which makes the force of his shivering _worse_ —and then all at once he doesn’t so much relax as _collapse_ , turning his face into Hayden’s pillow with a sound like a muffled sob.

It takes a while—long enough that Hayden adjusts to it, long enough that her breathing starts to even back out—but eventually his shivering stops. It stops, and Hayden’s does too, because where she’s still pressed up tight to him she can feel _heat_ now, instead of burning cold; the episode or flare-up or supernaturally-cold-induced-fever of it breaking. Hayden blinks herself back awake, surprised, and tips her head back so she can meet Theo’s eyes when he twists his head around to look at her.

He studies her face for a few seconds, his eyes unreadable in the dim light of her unlit room even with Hayden’s supernaturally-enhanced eyesight. “You didn’t have to do that,” He finally mutters, and for all that he phrases it as a statement there’s a guarded sort of question hidden in it, too.

Hayden just forces herself to roll her eyes. “We’ve been over this already,” She points out, because they _had_ ; because Hayden had said, _well, good thing I’m offering, then_. 

Theo doesn’t seem satisfied. There’s a thin layer of sweat covering his skin, now—whatever-it-was really did seem to act like a fever—and his shirt is stuck to his back stuck to Hayden’s chest with it, pulling uncomfortably as Theo turns over onto his back so that he can look at her directly, rather than from the awkward angle he had been before. Hayden doesn’t move, stubbornness flaring out from the center of her chest—did Theo just seem to _inspire_ obstinance? It would sure as hell explain a lot about him and Liam, anyway—and meets his attention head-on, her chin tipping up.

Theo spots it and laughs, suddenly, a breathy rush of disbelieving air. “You…you’re…” He starts, and then shakes his head, laughing under his breath again as he looks away. Hayden feels her brow furrow but before she can demand some kind of explanation Theo is turning back, his eyes a soft sort of searching. Finally his lips quirk and he finishes, “You’re unbelievable.”

Hayden’s ready to be indignant when she remembers: that’s what she’d yelled at Theo—yelled _twice_ —the first night she’d found him. Her annoyance twists right into something else, and Hayden can feel herself coloring as _she_ looks away this time; away from Theo’s eyes still watching her face. But almost instantly she feels fingertips on her jaw— _warm_ fingertips—and she gives in to their guiding pressure after a reluctant moment and turns back, looking down at Theo as he looks up at her.

“Hey,” He says, so quietly that it almost isn’t a word at all, and then he leans up—stopping once to give her the opportunity to protest, or move back—and then presses his mouth to hers when she doesn’t. Hayden closes her eyes at the first brush of his lips, and exhales out her held breath, and kisses him back.

The sex this time is slow. 

Less an all-or-nothing rush than a careful exploration, the both of them already a sweaty mess from Theo’s breaking supernatural cold-fever or whatever and out of things to prove, maybe: Hayden’s fingertips on Theo’s shoulders because she _wants_ them to be, and not because she’s searching for hints of Liam in them; Theo’s mouth on her neck, and her throat, and her collarbones, because he likes sucking his quickly-healing marks there, and not because he’s desperate for some connection to Liam. It’s certainly less _immediate_ , anyway, Theo disappearing under the covers at one point to put his mouth to the hot core of her, his fingers holding her open for his tongue and giving her something to grind against as he licks, and sucks, and strokes her.

Hayden comes the first time with her legs locked around Theo’s shoulders, and then she drags him back up so that she can kiss him, her body still _zinging_ with little aftershocks as she drops her hands to his cock. He bucks up into her grip with a groan, his mouth falling from hers as he buries his head in her shoulder, and Hayden slides one hand into his hair and holds him there as she works him, fully content to get him off like that as she feels the muscles of his abdomen against the back of her stroking fingers clench tighter and tighter and tighter.

Except.

“Wait,” Theo gasps, reaching down to still her hands. “Wait, please. I—”

He stops, clamming up, and Hayden nearly laughs, oddly delighted at his apparent sudden bout of propriety. She doesn’t, but Theo must still catch the flutter of her abdomen as she tries _not_ to, because he raises up some to glare at her.

“You’re the one who apparently can’t _say it_ ,” Hayden grouses, a little affronted, and then she does laugh—then she _shrieks_ —because Theo brings his hands up and digs them into her sides. “Oh, you asshole!” She gasps in between helpless guffaws, trying her best to squirm her away from his tickling hands and kicking him in the thigh for good measure.

She doesn’t get far. Theo drops his weight down some to help pin her for his merciless fingers, but he also doesn’t drag it out; his fingers still, and drag down to her hips instead, and Hayden finds herself looking up at him as her panting breaths slow, her knees on either side of his hips. He meets her eyes, and bites his lip, and doesn’t move until Hayden does. Until she nods; a short, sharp jerk of her head.

And then she throws her head back as Theo presses inside, her fingernails digging into his back as he slides forward, and forward, and forward.

After, Theo pulls out and flops onto his back, his lungs still working like bellows and their little cave of blankets now _sweltering_. Hayden nearly kicks them off before she remembers, abruptly, and doesn’t; before she leaves them exactly where they are, the slick, heated feel of Theo’s skin against hers a comfort, a balm; a relief. Theo tips his head to the side to look at her like he knows what she’s thinking. But if he does, he doesn’t say anything, just gives her a flicker of a smile and then groans, covering his face with his hands. 

He also goes back flat, after, and gives no sign of moving; Hayden squints at him suspiciously. “What?” She finally demands, unable to help herself. “No leading question about whether or not Val is working a double?”

Theo freezes, for a second—he maybe hadn’t been expecting her to call him out so bluntly—but then he relaxes back down, shrugging. “I know she is,” He replies eventually, and opens his eyes back up as he looks at her, his expression a little guarded for all that his tone is matter-of-fact.

Hayden studies him for a long few seconds, and then she flops down flat on her stomach and kicks a leg over his hip, curling it around the back of his far thigh. Theo jumps, initially, and then he drops a hand down to squeeze lightly at the back of her knee before trailing it up, up across her spine. Hayden shivers some at the touch, and then shivers again when he rolls over to press a kiss to her shoulder, and finally has to bury a pleased little smile in her pillow when he doesn’t move back; when he stays right on his side, curled up against her with her leg still over his hips.

“You’re washing my sheets while I’m at school tomorrow,” Hayden tells him, already more than half asleep even as she mumbles it. “Don’t try to get out of it, I _know_ you have the day off.”

“Whatever,” Theo mutters back, his fingers still tracing patterns across her back, and Hayden hides another little smile, and presses back into the touch, and goes to sleep.

\---

And so life—somehow—goes on. 

Hayden and Theo figure out how to explore their evolving relationship without reverting to close-mouthed animatrons every time they fall into bed together, and—miraculously—manage to do it without alerting Val to any change in circumstances. Theo inches closer and closer to having enough saved up to get his own place, even given all the money he’s secretly been funneling to Val; close enough that he starts waving apartment ads in Hayden’s face sometimes, looking for her opinion. But most critically—to Hayden, anyway—he starts coming to her when the supernatural remnants of his time in the skinwalker prison turn into full-blown fevers, and Hayden—she gets better at breaking them. 

All told, things wind up going about as well as can be expected, given _everything_ , and sometimes Hayden marvels at that but most of the time she just thinks to herself _gift horses_ , and lets it be; for once, just lets it be.

And then one afternoon it all goes to shit, because Hayden comes home from school to find Liam sitting on the stairs leading up to her front door.

For a split-second Hayden’s so happy to see him that her breath hitches in her chest with the force of it, this specific blooming kind of _warmth_ , and then in the space of a blink that warmth transmutes into an incandescent kind of fury, because she knows—she _knows_ —exactly why he’s here. 

It occurs to Hayden as she’s getting out of her car that Liam must have parked his ridiculous—and ridiculously identifiable—SUV a few blocks over and _walked_ here, all the better to stage this little scene. That thought adds kindling to the already-raging blaze of anger in her chest as she slams her door shut, pressure already prickling at her gums and the tips of her fingers; at the corners of her eyes, which she’s sure are flaring gold.

“Where is he,” Liam demands, blunt and almost affectless if it weren’t for the slight tremble to his voice; if it weren’t for the slight shake to his fingers, laced together between his spread knees in an attempt at calm coolness that Hayden can see right through.

“Go to hell,” Hayden spits back, and forces her way right past him for the door.

It’s clear Liam hadn’t been expecting that—had been expecting her to stop and argue with him, maybe—and he goes easier than he should, his attempt at an intimidating posture collapsing as Hayden’s action forces him off-balance and to the side. He recovers quickly, though, scrambling up after her and getting a hand around her wrist.

“Hayden!” He protests sharply, trying to drag her to a stop.

But Hayden’s _done_ ; they haven’t even started properly and she’s just done. It doesn’t help that Liam is holding her wrist the exact same way that Theo always does when Hayden’s trying to walk out of an argument she’s decided she doesn’t want to participate in, his fingers tight enough around the bone to make a point but never— _never_ —tight enough to hurt. Whirling around, Hayden yanks her wrist free and then shoves him back a step with her other hand, pointing her finger in his face to stop him as he immediately tries to recover his lost ground.

“Do _not_ ,” She hisses, the pressure in her mouth becoming more of a prickle; it’s possible she’s saying it through a mouthful of half-dropped fangs. “I don’t _owe you_ an explanation!”

She spins back around for the front door after she’s said it; a clear dismissal. It isn’t going to work and Hayden knows it, but she concentrates on getting the door unlocked and open anyway, and isn’t surprised in the slightest when Liam’s only reaction is to make a harsh, angry noise and follow her through when she steps inside.

“Actually, you kind of do!” Liam disagrees, his voice more than half a snarl. He shuts the door behind him at least as Hayden keeps moving forward, forcibly ignoring him as she lifts her bag’s strap over her shoulder so she can drop it carelessly by hers and Val’s and Theo’s pile of shoes; as she considers heeling off her own boots before leaving them on. “Have you forgotten who he _is?_ Have you forgotten what he’s _done?_ ”

And there’s the crux of it: there’s the trump card that Liam thinks he’s holding. 

But Hayden has her own trump card, and she whirls back around to face him and plants her feet as she yells, “Believe it or not, I do!” 

That draws Liam up short; he recoils slightly, his righteously indignant expression spasming into surprise for a second before it twists right back up. But Hayden just meets him glare for glare, because:

“But he hasn’t hurt anyone since he got here, and I’m guessing he hadn’t hurt anyone back before he left Beacon Hills, either, or you wouldn’t have staged this stupid scene, you would have _called me first_ to see if I was alright!” Hayden all but _screams_ at him, uncaring of how shrill she’s sounding, because she’s _right_.

Because she’s right, and from the way Liam’s stupid arrogant expression collapses in on itself, _shame_ sliding right in to take it’s place, Liam knows it, too. His mouth opens and closes a few times, his hot glare becoming something else as he blinks rapidly and looks away from her, and Hayden forces her fangs back behind her gums, her claws back into her fingertips; blinks away the molten gold from her eyes. 

“Look. I’m…I’m sorry, alright?” He finally manages, after a few long seconds have dragged themselves by, and now there’s a shake to his voice. It tugs at Hayden, a little, but she’s still so furious with him that the feeling is swiftly burned away by the anger still raging between her ribs. Liam chances a look up at her and winces, immediately jerking his gaze back down again. “It’s just, Argent and the Sheriff finally figured out where he went, and then we—and then _I_ —found out _who_ he was staying with, and—and—”

“And _what_ , Liam?” Hayden demands harshly. 

“I don’t know!” Liam shouts back, and then looks surprised at himself after he’s done it, adding more quietly, “I don’t…I just…”

But something about the wording of his explanation finally penetrates Hayden’s haze of fury and she finds herself narrowing her eyes at him, searching his downcast face and hunched-in shoulders. “You…” She starts, head tilting. “They didn’t send you,” She realizes, and Liam flinches. Hayden feels her anger flare right back up. “Scott or Argent or whoever didn’t _send you_ , you came here on your own!”

“Yes,” Liam hurries to agree, apparently _now_ having decided that honesty is the best policy. His arms come up to cross over his chest and he scuffs at the floor with the tip of one shoe as he explains, “They—they hadn’t decided what to do yet. They hadn’t…But _I_ …” 

_Couldn’t wait_ , Hayden hears, even though Liam hadn’t said it. Liam couldn’t wait any longer, not knowing where Theo was; not knowing who he was with. So he’d stolen the address from the Sheriff or Argent or whoever, probably, and had driven himself here without telling anyone, all the while driving himself into a more and more righteous fury with every mile. 

But he’s not the only one angry. He’s not the only one who has the _right_ to be angry.

Hayden forces herself to stop, and consider. The clock on the wall by the front door is ticking away, and Hayden watches it tick, tick, tick a few seconds before she sucks in a deep breath, and rakes her fingers back through her hair. 

And then she moves to dig her car keys back out of her bag.

Liam jerks forward. “Wait, Hayden—!”

Hayden just whirls on him, finger once more in his face. “You,” She orders him lowly, and presses forward when Liam swallows audibly and steps back, “are going to stop acting like a spoiled child and _wait here_ , do you understand me?”

“But where—where are _you_ going?” Liam stutters out, managing it even though he’s still cowering back some from the force of her anger and her jabbing finger. 

“I’m going to go _get_ him,” Hayden snaps, the _obviously_ silent but perfectly implied; Liam flinches, but he also continues to look confused. Forcing calm into her voice where she doesn’t feel it, Hayden explains, “His shift is almost up. And if he comes back here, and sees or smells you or whatever, he’s going to run.”

There’s a rebuke in her words, one that Hayden _really means_ —one that’s driven by the terrified thought in her mind that wonders _what if_ Theo had gotten home before her, and had been the first to realize Liam was there—and it translates into a perfectly scathing tone. Liam does more than flinch in response, now so caved-in on himself that he’s almost bent over. Hayden just smothers a scoff.

“Wait here,” She repeats, and doesn’t wait for him to agree before shoving back past him for the door.

Hayden hasn’t spent a lot of time around the construction crew Theo works with, but she’s stopped by enough times for whatever reason that they recognize her on sight. They wolf-whistle when she steps out of her car but Hayden’s not bothered; it’s not directed at her, the culprit’s attention entirely on Theo as he punches Theo in the arm, grinning all the while. Theo rolls his eyes but jogs towards Hayden regardless, a small smile twitching at his lips.

A small smile that immediately drops off his face the second he gets within a few feet of her.

“Hayden,” He breathes, his eyes widening and his feet rooting to the ground; Hayden grits her teeth, and meets his stunned gaze head-on.

“Come on, let’s go,” She orders, and jerks her chin back towards her car.

Theo doesn’t move. “Go _where?_ ” He demands, but it’s already half-frantic; his hands come up to rake painfully quick through his hair and then slide down to cover his mouth, his eyes jerking away from hers as his mind apparently kicks into high gear. “Shit. _Shit_. Who’s all with him? If it’s just Scott I can get away pretty easily, but if it’s Argent or the Sheriff, or,” He says, freezing and with horror dawning over his face, “or _Malia_ , _shit_ , she’s an _unparalleled_ tracker…”

“Theo!” Hayden snaps, interrupting his spiraling. Theo jerks and then looks at her, all deer-in-the-headlights wide-eyes and panic-short breaths. Hayden’s chest twists, her frustrated glare softening right along with her tone. “It’s just him,” She assures him. “The others don’t know he’s here.”

That seems to jolt him enough to pull him back into himself, some. He frowns, his hands starting to drift away from his face as he stares at her. “What? That doesn’t make any…” He stops, blinks blankly, and then narrows his eyes as he searches her face. “Then why is he…?”

“I don’t _know_ , Theo,” Hayden snaps, a twist of guilt cranking in her chest when he recoils slightly, but _god damn_ , is she already sick of being in the middle of his and Liam’s complete inability to communicate like functional adults. Forcing herself to take a deep, calming breath, she closes her eyes and then opens them back up as she tells him, gesturing back at her car as she does, “I don’t _know_ , which is why you need to come _with me_ to talk to him.”

But the unexpected intrusion of his past— _both_ of their pasts—has apparently kicked his instincts—all his bad, previously broken habits—into overdrive, and he frowns at her. “I don’t need a ride, I have my truck.” He waves a hand in its general direction, but Hayden just raises her eyebrows incredulously.

“Do you think I’m an _idiot?_ ” She asks, not even a demand so much as a genuine question; Theo flinches, which is all the answer she needs. “We’ll come back by and pick up your truck _later_ , now let’s _go_.”

Theo hesitates for a second longer, and then all the fight seems to drain out of him at once; his shoulders sag. “I have to clock out,” He tells her, and Hayden just gestures: _go on, then, go_.

Liam is, somewhat shockingly, still there when Hayden pulls back into the driveway; she knows, because she has to park to the side of his SUV. Hayden nearly interprets its presence as a childish circumvention of her order to _wait here_ —following the _letter_ , if not really the _spirit_ , of what she’d meant—before she recognizes it instead as a clumsy sort of apology; cleaning up his _staged scene_ , as best he could. Some of the hard knot of anger—both with Liam, and with Theo, and a little bit with herself—sitting up under Hayden’s throat starts to melt, and she swallows as she throws her car into park.

But next to her, Theo isn’t nearly so calm. “Hayden,” He whispers, his fingers white-knuckled around his thighs. 

Hayden stops from where she’d been already reaching for her door handle, and settles back into her seat as she looks over at him. After a few moments she bites her lip, her eyes drifting back out of the windshield. 

“If you don’t…If you _can’t_ …” She starts, and then closes her eyes, and takes another of those deep, calming breaths. “If you need to…” She tries again, and then can’t bring herself to say it, and instead just looks back over at him to meet his eyes as she promises, very quietly, “I’ll stop him from stopping you.”

Theo stares at her with naked surprise all over his face for a few long seconds, but then he looks away, and blinks, and breathes a few unsteady times, and then his expression hardens into one of determination. “No,” He finally decides, and looks back over at her. “No, let’s—let’s do this.”

Hayden still makes sure she’s the first through the door, though.

Liam rockets immediately off the couch where he’d been sitting with his head in his hands when they come in. He looks briefly at Hayden, an apologetic sort of grimace on his face, but his eyes drag almost instantly and a little magnetically to Theo behind her and it melts right off, a snarl—a fang-mouthed, golden-eyed _snarl_ —taking its place.

“ _You_ ,” He hisses, and takes a threatening step forward. Hayden debates moving to intercept him before staying where she is, Theo behind her but with his feet planted; unmoved.

“Liam,” Theo acknowledges neutrally, but the calmness of his reply just seems to set Liam off, and he’s over past Hayden and shoving Theo hard in the shoulders before Hayden can really react.

“Hey!” Hayden snaps, grabbing his arm and throwing him back a few steps.

Liam doesn’t even seem to _notice_. “How could you just _leave?_ ” He yells at Theo, who’s still stood stock-still from where Liam had shoved him. “After everything Scott and the others did for you! After—after everything they _didn’t do_ to you!” Liam adds pointedly, gesturing furiously, if keeping his feet where they are; seeming to recognize Hayden still standing tense and ready between him and Theo.

But Liam’s temper seems to be stoking Theo’s, and now _he_ takes a step forward. “Everything they _didn’t do_ to me?” He hisses back. “The Sheriff was going to _arrest me!_ ”

Hayden slaps a restraining hand on his chest and Theo blinks a few times, seemingly jerked out of his furious haze. He darts a look at her, his chest heaving under her hand, but almost immediately his attention is pulled back up because Liam makes a high, harsh noise.

“Are you _kidding_ me?” He shouts, the words burring into a half-growl as Liam apparently loses even more control of the shift. “What the fuck are you _talking about_ , he wasn’t going to _arrest_ you!”

“I heard him!” Theo disagrees, yelling it just as loud; Hayden pivots around so that she’s got both hands on his chest, now, pushing him back a step as he tries to force his way even closer to Liam. “The morning I left, I heard him and Argent and Scott talking about it!”

Liam stares at him in stunned silence for a few seconds—Hayden seeing it as she looks at Liam over her shoulder—and then his expression twists with disbelief. “They were just _talking_ , you fuck!” 

He makes another frustrated sound and whirls briefly away, like he can’t handle looking at Theo for a second longer. He takes a few deep breaths and then turns back around. 

“You know Scott—he’s _obsessive_ about exploring all options. If you’d stuck around and _listened_ to the _rest_ of the conversation, you’d know that they all decided that didn’t make any sense!” Liam concludes; he starts out levelly but is back to all but yelling by the end.

It’s about the explanation Hayden had expected, frankly, but she still feels her heart twist in her ribcage as the rhythm of Theo’s heaving chest under her hands starts to slow, and she looks back at Theo to see him staring uncomprehendingly at Liam. She can almost hear the pieces realigning and falling back into a different configuration in his head—a different _result_ , a possible reality that he’d all but foreclosed by assuming the worst—and she slides her hands up from his chest to his face as his expression starts to crumple in on itself.

“Hey,” She whispers, cupping his jaw as he looks helplessly down at her. “Hey, it’s okay.”

The action—the comforting stroke of her thumb over Theo’s cheek—is automatic, but it’s also a dead giveaway, and one that Liam catches. He sucks in a high, harsh breath behind them, and both Hayden and Theo freeze.

“Oh, no. No _way_ ,” Liam breathes, and Hayden feels her jaw clench as she twists around to meet his disbelieving stare. His _blue-eyed_ stare; the force of his surprise had apparently knocked the shift loose. “I knew I smelled…but I thought it was just from…”

He clamps his jaw shut, but Hayden can fill in what he’d been about to say easily enough: that he’d smelled hers and Theo’s mingled scents, but instead of drawing the correct conclusion—the _obvious_ one, really, even _Hayden_ had been able to detect the change—he’d probably told himself it was just because they were living together. But there’s apparently no lying to himself now; gold starts to bleed back into his irises as he stares at them.

Hayden feels her own temper—banked, buried underneath the raging force of Liam’s, and the equal-and-opposite flare of Theo’s—threatening to spark right back up. “Don’t, Liam,” She warns him, her fingers tightening around Theo’s jaw. “We don’t owe you an explanation.”

Liam’s jaw clenches harder, and Hayden can almost hear the words he’s keeping locked behind his teeth: _actually, you do!_ But he seems to recognize in her the immovable object she’s prepared to be, and flicks his eyes to Theo’s over her shoulder instead.

“You always let her speak for you like that?” He sneers, a petty sort of viciousness all over his face, and Hayden _loses_ it.

“Wouldn’t _you_ like to know!” She snarls before Theo can respond, recognizing as she does so the reflexive burn of her shifting teeth, and eyes, and fingertips as she whirls to glower at Liam head-on.

This time it’s _Theo_ who catches _her_ around the waist and drags her back. “Hayden, don’t!” He orders, pulling her back against himself and leaving his arm like a steel bar across her hips, holding her firm.

Liam had initially recoiled back when she’d lunged at him but he recovers quickly, his upper lip curling back in a silent snarl. Hayden feels her muscles start to tense, fully prepared to keep yelling—fully prepared to give back everything Liam throws out and _more_ —but then she stops, surprise blanking her mind, and looks back at Theo.

He freezes for a second, his cheeks flushing, and then he ducks his head to hide his face in her hair. “Sorry,” He whispers miserably, his hand and arm spasming around her hips but not letting go. 

The action drives Hayden harder back against him—against the half-hard bulge of his cock—but Theo doesn’t seem _pleased_ by the pressure; he makes a hurt sound. Hayden stares back at the slice of his face that she can see.

Then she glances reflexively at Liam to see him looking just as confused, the swelling tide of it briefly enveloping his anger, and Hayden swallows, and looks back at Theo, a kernel of intuition starting to sprout in her mind. _You always let her speak for you like that_ and _wouldn’t you like to know_ , and whether or not Liam actually _does_ want to know, there’s a part of Theo that wants to show him. Hayden stares at Theo’s squeezed-shut eyes for a moment longer, and then turns around in the circle of his restraining arm so that she’s facing him directly, again; so that she can bring her hands back up to cradle his face.

“Hey,” She whispers, just like she had when she’d accidentally given up their collective ghost _to_ their collective ghost. “Hey, it’s okay.”

“No, it isn’t,” Theo disagrees miserably, still with his eyes tightly closed; refusing to look at her.

“Yes, it—” Hayden starts, and then cuts herself off with a frustrated noise, tightening her grip a little in an attempt—which fails—to get him to open his eyes. “Theo, _yes it is_.”

And she _means it_. She means it because Theo isn’t the only one who wants to _show_ Liam, suddenly; he isn’t the only one who wants to make Liam understand how little he understands. Biting off another noise, Hayden gives up on trying to get Theo to open his eyes and instead goes up on her toes, pressing her mouth to his in a harsh, hard kiss. 

_That_ snaps him out of it. He makes a confused sound and pulls back, staring at her. And he isn’t the only one; behind her, Liam gives a punched-out _whuff_ and—when she twists around to give him a challenging glare—is watching them with wide, wide eyes. 

Wide, _dilated_ eyes; Hayden can see how black they are even from where she’s standing.

“I don’t—I don’t understand what’s happening,” Liam admits, his eyes mostly on Hayden but flicking every now and again to Theo’s, like he might find the explanation hidden on Theo’s face, instead. 

Hayden just feels her jaw clench. “No, you don’t,” She agrees mercilessly, and feels a mean twist of satisfaction in her chest when Liam flinches. “But _you_ were the one who forced your way in here demanding answers, so if you want them, shut the hell up and watch. Otherwise, _get out_.” 

Liam’s mouth drops wide open in surprise as he apparently realizes what she means, and that twist of satisfaction in Hayden’s chest becomes a full-blown _flare_ , spreading out hot and fast through her veins and limbs. But then she stops, and blinks, and starts to shrink back in on herself as she swallows and drags her gaze back up to Theo’s, already preemptively wincing.

“I mean…shit,” She starts, and then hesitates before she adds, “I’m sorry, we don’t—”

“No!” Theo cuts her off, and then looks surprised at himself, and then immediately panicked as Hayden recoils from the force of his reply. He hurries to get his hands back on her hips to pull her back in, shaking his head a little wildly as he rushes to clarify, “No, not _no_ , no,” He says, completely incomprehensibly, and then closes his eyes like he’s praying for patience, before he takes a deep breath and _actually_ clarifies, “ _No_ , as in don’t—don’t apologize. I want—I _want—_ ”

He can’t seem to finish his sentence, but Hayden doesn’t need him to: after all, she _wants_ , too. 

That only leaves one outstanding question mark, and Hayden twists back around—feeling Theo’s attention flick up, and out, as well, as she does it—to look back at Liam. “Well?” She demands, and holds Liam’s eyes as he jerks his gaze back up to hers and stares.

It takes a few long, _long_ dragging seconds, and then he nods, sharp and jerky, like he can’t believe what he’s doing. Hayden waits, unsatisfied, and after a few frozen seconds Liam nods again; he squares his shoulders, and looks her right in the eye, and nods. 

Initially Theo tries to lead them both to the basement, but Hayden doesn’t want to go; doesn’t want to act like what they’re about to do—what Hayden and Theo have already _been_ doing—is something that they have to hide, or that can be packed away whenever Theo finally moves out, and into his own place. So she digs in her heels until Theo stops—Liam nearly blundering right into her back—and looks back at her quizzically, and then she twists her wrist in his grip so that _she’s_ holding _him_ instead, and starts dragging him back towards her bedroom.

She also grabs Liam’s wrist in her free hand as she goes.

Neither Liam nor Theo seem to have any idea what they’re doing, and they keep looking at Hayden as if for direction. And arguably this whole thing _is_ Hayden’s fault—scratch that, it’s _definitely_ her fault—but she doesn’t have any better idea than they do; she’s operating on pure, desperate instinct, and the helpless squirming ball of arousal in her gut, and—and the _need_ , even more powerful than both of those things, to prove something to Liam. To Theo.

To herself.

Eventually she gives up on finesse and shoves Liam down onto the corner of her desk. “Stay,” She orders him, and Liam gives her a wide-eyed nod. 

Theo is still stood right where she’d left him in the middle of the room, practically vibrating with tension—but good tension, _desperate_ tension, not supernatural-fever tension—and Hayden can’t help but give him a helpless smile as she reaches for him; as she presses her mouth to his, and presses him back, step by step until his knees hit her mattress and he sits, pulling her down with him with his hands cradling her face. Behind them Liam makes a noise, but when Hayden glances back at him—her knees now up on either side of Theo’s hips on the bed—he’s right where she’d put him, though his hand is creeping down towards the bulge between his legs. Hayden studies him for a second, debating telling him _go ahead_ —debating telling him _that’s the point_ —but then she looks back down at Theo, and smiles at him as he smiles helplessly back at her, and doesn’t.

She gets a little lost in kissing him, truthfully, a tingling sort of relief spreading through her limbs as some of the winched-up tension she hadn’t even fully realized she’d been carrying around since she’d first spotted Liam starts to unwind; this isn’t anything like how she imagined the situation resolving itself, but. Still, after awhile the helpless little hitches of Theo’s hips against hers start to become the best kind of distraction, the slick stroke of Theo’s tongue starting to become a little less coordinated in turn, and eventually Hayden leans back—Theo’s hands on her hips to steady her—and reaches for the hem of her shirt.

Things speed up, after that. 

Theo groans and helps her strip her shirt off, and goes right back to kissing her—messier this time, involving more teeth—as he reaches back around once it’s out of the way to find the clasp of her bra, get it undone and the straps slid down her arms. Behind them Liam shudders out a gasping exhale and that just makes Hayden _more_ frantic, her fingers fumbling for the bottom of Theo’s shirt so that she can drag it up, up until she interrupts Theo sucking an instantly-healing mark into her neck, Theo leaning back with a reluctant noise to let her pull it the rest of the way off.

Once it’s gone he tries to twist, one arm around her back to help steady her as he moves to get her on her back. But Hayden— _wouldn’t you like to know_ —stops him at the last second, pulling back and then twisting the _other_ way so that _Theo_ winds up on his back, sideways on the end of her bed and staring up at her through wide eyes, Hayden perched over his hips. 

“Oh,” Theo breathes, his eyes flicking to Liam still sat on the corner of her desk; to Liam, now with a perfect view of Theo, and Hayden, and Theo _and_ Hayden. “ _Oh_ ,” He moans, arching his head back and his hands spasming around her hips.

Liam chokes on his next inhale.

Hayden can’t decide whether she wants to draw the sheer insanity of what they’re doing out as a kind of petty revenge, or whether she _needs_ to do the opposite out of pure desperation, arousal pulsing steadily between her legs, but Theo winds up taking the decision out of her hands. He leans up suddenly and gets them flipped around, keeping their positions as best he’s able so that Liam gets the best perspective he can, but angling them so that he can slide down between Hayden’s legs without falling off the bed. He looks up at her once he’s there, his fingers hovering over the button of her jeans, and she nods, fast and frantic. 

Hayden almost _shrieks_ at the first touch of his tongue to her clit. But Theo’s familiar with her now, and pins her hips down, though he does it this time with his hands on either side of her hip-bones, and not with a forearm barred across her stomach like he usually does. Hayden realizes _why_ when she hears Liam’s whine, and she can’t help but tilt her head back to look at him even as Theo really gets to work; Liam’s eyes flick to hers—wide, and golden—but they almost immediately drag back down her chest to her core. 

To Theo, now laving his tongue over her in long, dragging strokes. Hayden’s eyes slip closed, and she moans as she lets her neck relax back down, her eyes slitting back open to meet Theo’s as she slides a hand into his hair; he brings a hand up to touch her wrist, just once; just gently.

She comes fast, worked up from Theo’s tongue, and the addition of his clever fingers, and from the eventual slick sound—Hayden tilting her head back up to see at the sound of a zipper—of Liam stroking himself, his cock pulled hastily out of the _V_ in his jeans and his shirt pushed carelessly up out of the way. Hayden watches him for a while, helpless—and Liam _watches_ her watch him—but as she gets closer and closer she refocuses on Theo, scratching at the sensitive skin behind his ear and eventually gasping his name as he drives her over the edge, his tongue left flat against her clit to give her something to grind against as she does.

She half-expects—when she can finally think past the roaring in her ears—that Liam will have already come, too, but when she tips her head weakly back to check he’s got his middle finger and thumb circled around the base of his cock. Surprised, Hayden flicks her eyes up to his to find him already looking back at her, desperation raw on his face and his cheeks flushed, his lips bitten and red. 

“Hayden,” He stammers out, uneven and breathy. “Hayden, _Theo, please_.”

Hayden doesn’t actually know what he’s asking. It’s possible he might not know, either, not with how worked up he clearly is, and she’s about to do the only thing she can think of— _ask_ —when Theo suddenly rises up on his knees. The movement jerks her attention back to him and their eyes meet, and then Hayden doesn’t _need_ to ask, because Theo already _is_. He trails feather-light fingertips over the back of her thigh; a touch that, if it was a little harder, would drag her leg up and over his hip. Hayden looks back up at him from where her eyes had fallen to follow the course of his fingers, and then she smiles at him, and arches back a little further, and purposefully drags her _own_ leg up and over his hip, drawing him in. 

He’s careful about sliding inside her once he’s shed his jeans and climbed back up between her legs, giving her all the time she needs to adjust, but he’s less careful about the rhythm he starts up once she drags her fingers up his back and then _clutches_ at his hair in a clear signal. Hayden doesn’t think it’s intentional; she can hear Liam’s helpless, hitching cries just as well as Theo can, and if she hadn’t already come once she’d probably be just as wild. As it is it doesn’t take long for Theo’s thrusts to become even less coordinated, and she’s bracing for his climax—for the held-deep _press_ that always accompanies it—when Theo suddenly _stops_.

He _stops_ , shuddering, and for a half-panicked moment Hayden thinks he’s slipping into one of his supernatural cold-fevers. She starts to draw back, intending to get a good look at him, but then she _can’t_ , because Theo is drawing her _in_ , and then rolling them. Frowning, Hayden pushes herself up with her hands on flat on his chest and then abruptly _gets it_ , Theo still inside her and Liam’s view now _perfect_ for seeing that fact.

“Oh, oh _christ_ ,” Liam moans, his head thunking back against the wall behind him, his hand stilling but spasming around his cock.

Hayden studies the picture he makes for a moment, and then tilts her head and looks back down at Theo, who looks up at her. He trails his fingers up her thighs, from her bent knees to her hips, and then around, and back, so that he’s holding them tight. He also slides his legs up behind her so that his knees are bent behind her back, his feet flat; Hayden smiles slow, and syrupy, and leans forward just enough that she can get her own toes pointed down into the bed, her hands still braced on flat on his chest. 

And then she _moves_.

She raises up, and slides back down, Theo’s hands tightening on her hips to help lift her and then pull her back down as his hips come up to meet hers. His lack of rhythm from before is gone, too, his strokes deep and precise and dragging deliciously against her clit, and this time it’s _Hayden_ who can’t hold to the beat of it, her arms starting to shake and her thighs starting tremble as the pleasure in her gut starts to wind tighter, and tighter again. After awhile she has to collapse flat on his chest, Liam’s view be damned, and merely hold on as Theo takes that as his cue to abandon their careful rhythm for something harder, and wilder, as he drives both of them closer to their individual climaxes.

Hayden comes first, but _barely_. She buries her cry in Theo’s shoulder and practically melts against him as she gasps her way through it, barely able to count off his additional thrusts in her head as he gives one, two, three last pumps of his hips and then groans, long and loud, as he holds her hips tight against his. 

They stay like that for a minute or so, just breathing—Theo’s hips eventually relaxing back down, and his grip gentling to become more of a loose-limbed hold—and then Hayden hears a hitching inhale and looks up, having in all honesty all but forgotten about Liam. He’s staring back at them with comically wide eyes, and with a hand—with a hand covered in his own come, the rest of it pooling in the curve of his heaving abdomen as he apparently breathes through his own orgasm, too. 

But the second he catches Hayden’s eyes, his pleasure-shocked expression slams closed.

“Oh. Oh, my god,” He breathes, high-pitched and more than a little panicked. “Oh, jesus, I’m so sorry.” 

He rockets off Hayden’s desk, stopping only briefly to make a face at the mess of his stomach before he pales, again, and scrambles to zip himself back up, apparently uncaring of the fact that he’s making a mess of both his jeans and his shirt. 

“I’m so sorry,” He repeats, and makes a lunge for the closed door, which Hayden barely manages—sliding carefully free of Theo and wincing at the pleasantly sore complaint of her own muscles, and the slick wetness between her legs—to intercept. Liam jumps back from her like she’s on _fire_ , hands already up between them as he tells her, “I’m sorry,” again.

Hayden doesn’t know what the hell is going on. She looks to Theo but he looks frankly more confused than she feels, propped half-up on an elbow and staring in complete bewilderment at Liam. 

_Up to me again, then_ , Hayden finds herself thinking, and she keeps one hand pressed firmly to her closed bedroom door as she tries—and fails—to catch Liam’s eyes, and then just gives up and demands, “Liam, what is _wrong_ with you? You’re sorry for _what?_ ”

“For—for _this!_ ” He insists, waving his hands wildly around to seemingly encompass himself and the room and Hayden and Theo still both naked within it. “You were right,” He stumbles over himself to say, “Earlier, when you said I’d forced my way in here demanding answers. And—and when you said you didn’t owe me an explanation, and you _didn’t_ , but I _demanded_ _one_ anyway, and—” And his eyes widen, and he stops fumbling around to stare at her in complete horror as he all but wails, “And then I made that _stupid_ comment about you—about you _speaking_ for him, like some kind of _misogynist ass—_ ”

Hayden blinks, completely thrown. Part of that is Liam’s full-blown panic and part of that is that he apparently knows how to correctly pronounce misogynist, but in either case, she realizes that some wires have gotten crossed. Either that, or Liam—in a typical bout of martyred _Liam-ness_ —has purposefully crossed them as the easier of the things to deal with of the selection currently available in his head, and Hayden doesn’t know how to fully address the meat of Liam’s concerns but she knows how to address one of them. And so she hurries over to him to get her hands around his face.

“Hey. _Hey_ ,” She insists, flowing with him when he tries to retreat away from her again. “You didn’t mean the stupid comment, I know that. I _knew_ that when you made it, you hyper-sensitive dork.”

It’s not the best outcome but Liam seems to tangle himself up in her seemingly too-easy forgiveness; he stops moving around so frantically and stares at her. “I still _shouldn’t have—_ ”

“No,” She agrees calmly, “you really shouldn’t have. But you did, and now you’ve apologized, and it’s _fine_.”

Liam searches her face, apparently realizing that she _means it_ , and then his expression crumples right back up into apparent agony. “That—that doesn’t change me using you two like…like…like my own personal _porn!_ ” He all but shrieks, and yeah, _definitely_ some crossed wires tangled up between all of them, but it’s Theo who answers.

“Wow, okay, Narcissus,” He snorts, flopping onto his back and apparently completely unconcerned with his continued nakedness as Liam’s—and Hayden’s, for that matter—eyes snap over to him. “It wasn’t even your _idea_ , you freak.”

“That’s a good point, actually,” Hayden realizes, frowning thoughtfully at Theo as he looks at her and raises his eyebrows: _see, aren’t I impressive?_ She snorts in turn, unable to help the tiny smirk that quirks her lips at his blatant self-admiration. “I think if anyone was going to claim credit, Theo and I would have to throw down for it.”

She says it the way she says it— _claim credit_ —deliberately. She can see Liam realize that, turning the wording over in his head—people _claim credit_ most often for good ideas, for things that they don’t regret—but he doesn’t believe her, yet. 

He doesn’t believe _them_.

Biting her lip, Hayden considers. She and Theo haven’t talked about it— _jesus_ , have they not talked about it, or for that matter _anything_ that’s happened in the last hour—but Hayden takes a risk anyway, and drops her hands to Liam’s shoulders, and slowly turns him towards the bed. Over his shoulder Theo’s eyes go wide, and his mouth drops open, but he doesn’t say no.

He very much doesn’t say no.

 _Liam_ does, though. Or at the very least he digs in his heels, his momentarily-quieted panic flaring right back up. “What are you _doing?_ ” He hisses to her, darting a glance at Theo over his own shoulder, like Theo is somehow incapable of hearing him; Theo gives the back of his head an incredulous look when Liam turns back around to Hayden. 

And so Hayden stops. She _stops_ , completely and without reservation, taking her hands off his shoulders and stepping back and, even more importantly, clearing herself out of his path to the door. Behind Liam, Theo swallows, disappointment flickering bright and obvious over his face, but he meets her eyes and nods, once.

“If you don’t—don’t want to,” She says, trying her best to strip _everything_ out of her voice—judgement, expectation, desire—to leave only honest advice, “then you shouldn’t. Then we’re not,” She hastens to correct, “then we’re not trying to _make_ you.”

She meets Liam’s eyes, and then winces—for the first time in a while since all this started back to being the unsure one—and she finds herself looking automatically to Theo. He holds her gaze, his mouth set in one determined line, and she swallows, the bloom of warmth in her chest she feels looking at him looking at her shaking the rest of what she’d wanted to say loose.

“But if you think—if you think you _can’t_ , for whatever reason, then…” She doesn’t know how to finish that statement, so she just shrugs. It occurs to her that it’s a little ridiculous for her to be having this conversation still completely nude, but it also feels—right, somehow; no place for half-truths or uncertainty to hide.

Liam doesn’t seem to know how to respond, either generally or in response to what she’d just said. He stares at her, and then at Theo, and while his mouth drops open with the heave of his still-panting breaths, he doesn’t say anything. 

It’s Theo who comes to their collective rescues, again. 

“I mean, you might as well have been there the first time we fucked,” He suddenly admits, his eyes flicking to Hayden’s in a preemptive apology for letting that unspoken secret—unspoken even between _them_ —spill out; Liam freezes, and turns to stare at him—stopping only briefly to stare at _Hayden_ —all the while gaping like a fish. 

But Hayden—Hayden barely notices Theo’s apology, because she’s about to have to make one of her own; because a terrible, _terrible_ thought has just occurred to her, and she’s going to have to spill out another of their shared secrets to try and exorcise it.

“Neither of us left because of you,” Hayden finds herself saying as she studies Liam’s twisted-up expression. “You—you know that, right?”

Over Liam’s shoulder Theo’s expression goes slack with his surprise, but he doesn’t look angry; he just looks _raw_. Hayden grimaces regardless and then finds her attention pulled fully back to Liam, because he makes a hurt, helpless sound and _collapses_ , some, his shoulders curling in enough that Hayden reflexively makes a noise and moves to catch him, though he stays upright. He does look up at her, though, the look on his face broken wide open; an open wound. Hayden doesn’t know what to say.

“Then why’d you _leave?_ ” He demands in a harsh whisper, and Hayden feels her own expression twist up as she stares down at him. 

“Because life isn’t that simple,” Theo answers instead, and for all that there’s _something_ in his expression when Hayden looks over at him, it’s also unapologetic. “You know that, Liam.”

He doesn’t say _and so do you_ , but he flicks his eyes up to Hayden’s, and she feels tears start to burn in the corners of her eyes, humiliatingly enough. Theo winces when he realizes, and _now_ there’s an apology on his face, but instead of making it he just groans in loud, dramatic frustration and rakes his hands down his face.

“ _Jesus_ , we’re not—would you two just _sit down_ , or something?” He snaps, like his temporary zen has been spent and he’s back to standing on whatever shaky ground he’d found himself on the second he’d first smelled Liam on Hayden at the construction site. “We’re not going to figure all this out _tonight_. _Christ_.”

Hayden nearly smiles; she feels her lips twitch, anyway. Theo’s reversion to jackassery seems to have the same effect on Liam, too; he scowls, and opens his mouth to no-doubt make a scathing return remark, except then his attention flickers down to where Theo’s spent cock is still lying soft against his thigh. He goes _scarlet_.

“Okay, well, maybe you could put some goddamn _pants_ _on_ first!” He finally shouts back, but even Hayden can detect the waver in it. 

She can detect it, which means Theo _definitely_ can; he drops his hands away from his face, and eyes Liam speculatively. 

And then he smiles, shark-like. 

“You sure you _want me_ to?” He double-checks, and slides his far leg up so his foot is flat; all the better to put himself on display. 

Liam chokes on his sharp inhale. Hayden brings a hand up to cover her mouth, smothering a laugh, but it’s a feint, a misdirect, because there’s a throb starting back up between her legs that’s _also_ suddenly very interested in whether or not Liam actually wants Theo to put his pants back on. She darts a glance at Theo, who holds her gaze for a moment and then _grins_ , and Hayden colors and jerks her gaze away to look at Liam, who’s still coughing and trying to recover his breath.

“ _Jesus_ ,” He complains as he straightens back up. “You can’t just—you can’t just _say things like that_ to people.”

“Why not?” Theo challenges, falling easily and instantly into the rhythm of his and Liam’s well-worn penchant for arguing. But his body also gives his attempted veneer of casual disinterest away; Hayden can see his cock starting to harden again against his thigh.

Liam just stares. “You can’t be—you can’t be serious.” He starts out saying it to Theo but finishes saying it to Hayden, and Hayden meets his incredulous stare and then shrugs. 

“Why not?” She echoes softly. 

Liam gapes at her, now, but in his apparent attempt to get his thoughts into some kind of order his gaze drops down to her chest—her _bare_ chest—and he goes bright red again. Making a pathetic sort of whine, Liam covers his face with his hands and backs up a step, like the added distance might help clarify the situation. 

Hayden bites her lip. Not that long ago she’d been afraid of pushing Theo too far, of accidentally stumbling over _his_ line of _too much_ , and she thinks she and Theo may have collectively shoved Liam over his. And maybe it’d been _way less_ than Liam had deserved for showing up unannounced bearing judgement for things he didn’t understand like some kind of righteous crusader, but he’s still—still _Liam_ , and so Hayden shoves down the excitement and the arousal—and the _hope_ , frankly—that’d started to twist themselves together in her chest, and goes to step around him for the bed. 

And then she can’t, because Liam’s hand is back around her wrist, and Liam’s mouth is on hers.

He pulls her in too hard, really, sending her colliding into him with enough force that they both stagger back a step. Hayden makes a startled noise and Liam rockets backwards for a second, _terror_ all over his face, but the second he gets a good look at her expression—and the complete lack of fear, or anger, or disgust there—he dives right back in, his hands sliding into her hair to hold her steady for the press of his mouth. Shuddering a little, Hayden drops her own mouth open for him and meets his tongue when he immediately licks inside, her hands coming up to clench in his collar.

“Holy _shit_ ,” Is Theo’s only comment when Liam finally pulls back, his mouth still close enough to hers that Hayden feels his breath panting over her lips. She turns to look at Theo to find him staring wide-eyed back at them, his fingers clenched in the sheets on either side of his hips like he’d been too distracted to even get a hand around himself.

“Yeah, _fuck you_ ,” Liam suddenly speaks up, sounding a little more steady if a banked sort of wild. “How do you think _I’ve_ felt for the last _hour?_ ”

Theo makes a face, and Hayden nearly groans _you two seriously can’t help yourselves, can you_ , when she realizes that that’s—kind of the point. So instead of pointing that out as Theo sneers at Liam, she twists around so that _Liam_ has his back to the bed and then _shoves_.

His arms pinwheel, hilariously enough, and she catches a deep look of betrayal on his face in the split-second before his balance fails him and he crashes back onto the bed. Theo’s reflexes are quick enough that he’s moved back out of the way by the time Liam lands, but he almost instantly moves back in; Hayden wonders if the second move had even been _conscious_. It leaves him very nearly pressed up against Liam’s side, though with a crucial few inches of space between them that Hayden knows, without a doubt, that Liam is going to have to cross.

If he wants to.

And apparently he does: he stares up at Theo after he lands for a few stunned, held-breath seconds, and then all at once his expression twists and he surges upward, pulling Theo’s mouth down to his with a hand clenched tightly in Theo’s hair. It’s the opposite of graceful; Hayden literally hears their teeth clack. But neither one of them seems to _care_ ; they spend a few seconds jockeying for position and then Theo abruptly shudders and rolls onto his back, ceding control to Liam and moaning quietly when Liam immediately takes advantage to climb on top of him. 

Hayden stares. Given hers and Theo’s previously unspoken acknowledgement of what Liam had been and remained to each of them—given _you might as well have been there the first time we fucked_ —she’d imagined them together once or twice. The sort of idle fantasy that was more of a curiosity than anything _real_ , pictured because the thought was there but forgotten about immediately afterwards because it’d seemed such an unchangeably remote possibility. 

But _jesus_ , had her absent imaginings not done them justice.

They’re rough with each other; rougher than either of them have ever been with her. Liam’s fingers tangled in Theo’s hair _have_ to be painful, and Hayden can see the bruises forming and healing, forming and healing, that Theo’s squeezed-tight hands are pressing into the skin of Liam’s hips, visible just below his rucked-up shirt. Liam’s loud, too, which she knew—Liam’s wrist shoved between his teeth when she’d had him in her mouth, desperate not to alert Val or the pack or whoever was around—but the effect it has on _Theo_ is unexpected; every time Liam gives one of his hitching gasps, or heartfelt groans, Theo’s hips buck, helplessly, until he’s all but constantly rutting up against Liam still sitting astride them.

Hayden’s content to watch—she really, _really_ is, already sated and pleasantly sore and admittedly just a little sticky—but all the sudden Liam sits up, gasping like he’s coming up for air from underwater, and looks around a little wildly for her. His eyes widen when he spots her still standing where she’d been, and he makes a clumsy little lunge for her; below him, Theo sucks in a huge breath, his mouth opening in a silent cry and his head arching back.

“Hey, hey,” Liam says breathlessly, dragging her over closer to them. “You, you, you gotta—”

The words tripping over themselves coming out of his mouth aren’t making any sense but his _hands_ make clear enough what he wants, pressing at her hips and shoulders until she relents and climbs up on the bed next to Theo. Theo reaches for her immediately, one hand on Liam’s hip and the other coming up to curl up and around her head, pulling her down to his mouth until he can kiss her. She moans at the first brush of his tongue because he _tastes_ different than he usually does, and Theo grins against her lips, clearly having made the point he’d wanted to make.

And then he has to suck in another of those sharp breaths and break away from her, and Hayden looks down the stretch of his body and immediately understands why; Liam jerks his eyes up to hers—looking a little guilty, the dork—from where he’d slid down Theo’s legs so that he’s between them instead, one of his hands now wrapped around Theo’s cock. He’s got his other hand braced against Theo’s opposite inner thigh, and even as Hayden watches Theo gives into the pressure and spreads that leg wider, the muscle under Liam’s fingers jumping and shivering. 

“ _Christ, christ_ ,” Theo is gritting out under his breath, the hand that he’d had around Hayden’s head falling to wrap around one of her thighs, clenching and relaxing in time with Liam’s slow, curious explorations. 

His other hand he brings up to cover first his mouth, and then his eyes, leaving it there as a makeshift blindfold even as his hips strain up into Liam’s grip. Hayden frowns, watching him, and then reaches for it, drawing it up and then to the side and pinning it there gently with her weight. Brow furrowing, Theo tilts his head back to look at her, and Hayden brings her free hand forward to trace lightly over his jaw before she leans down to kiss him, just once; just a gentle press of her lips to his.

“Don’t,” She instructs almost soundlessly against his mouth. “Watch.”

What she means is: _don’t hide_. What she means is: _be here with him_. 

She means: _be here with_ us.

Theo swallows; she can feel it in the bob of his throat under her carefully hovering fingers. When she pulls back he’s still looking at her, studying her face, but then he nods, once, and closes his eyes.

When he opens them back up, he fixes them on Liam.

Liam, who’d missed the entirety of their interlude thanks to his sole, almost comical—if it weren’t for the circumstances—focus on his hand on Theo’s thigh; on his hand on Theo’s cock. Even Hayden can tell he’s experimenting with grips, with pressure, and the result—even though Liam probably doesn’t fully realize he’s doing it—is that Theo can’t predict and therefore can’t prepare for the sensations, his heels digging into the sheets and his fingers spasming around Hayden’s thigh, her fingers still tangled with his from the hand she still has pinned. But as much as Hayden can tell he’s being overwhelmed by it—by Liam—every time his eyes slip closed he blinks them right back open; every time his head tilts back on a breathy moan he brings it right back down.

And then he bites off a high, protesting whine and bucks up into empty air, because Liam suddenly stops, sitting back on his heels and—most critically—taking his hands away.

“I want to try something,” He announces—practically a proclamation—and Hayden squints at him, confused, and then glances down at Theo. Theo doesn’t look back at her; he’s too busy staring at Liam with an incredulous, very nearly insulted expression.

Liam makes a face right back at him, but then it melts right back into a sort of nervous determination. He also touches his tongue briefly to his bottom lip; Hayden catches the quick flash of pink.

“ _Oh!_ ” She realizes, eyes widening. 

Theo’s still too wound up from Liam’s unintentional tease and still too wrapped up in glaring at Liam because of it to really think much past either of those things, but Liam darts a hopeful look at Hayden from underneath a ducked, wincing brow, and then straightens up a little when he sees whatever’s on her face. Hayden gives him a flicker of a smile and strokes the thumb of the hand she’d let drift down to rest on Theo’s chest across Theo’s slick, overheated skin, and smiles down at Theo, too, his fingers spasming around her thigh as he finally catches the interaction and tilts his head back to look up at her.

 _You’re going to like this_ , Hayden thinks down at him, but out loud she just says, “I promise it’s not rocket science,” as she looks back up at Liam. “Just keep your teeth covered—” She pulls her own lips briefly between her lips to demonstrate, “—and, you know, go with your gut. You’ll figure it out.”

And apparently _Theo_ has finally figured out what they’re talking about, because his whole body seems to clench up with a hard, harsh shudder for a second, and then he hisses up at her, “Go with his _gut?_ Have you _met—_ ”

Hayden slaps a hand over his mouth, muffling the rest of his sentence, and smiles serenely at Liam. “Not rocket science,” She repeats encouragingly, and ignores Theo biting at her palm in retribution.

Liam hesitates for a few seconds longer—maybe hoping that she’ll give him some more detailed instructions to follow—and then his mouth thins to a determined line and he looks back down at where he’d left—intentionally or not—one of his hands framing Theo’s still _very_ hard cock. In other circumstances his level of focus would be hilarious, but in _this_ circumstance Hayden just bites her lip and squirms a bit, hyper-aware of Theo’s tense frame beneath her and the way he’s holding his breath in anticipation as he stares down at Liam, her hand still over his mouth. 

Liam flicks one last look up at the pair of them, and then he leans down.

Theo immediately goes rigid at the first touch of Liam’s lips to his cock, his heels slipping on the sheets on either side of Liam’s ribs as he fights, and mostly succeeds, not to buck up into Liam’s mouth. He also yanks his hand free from where Hayden had still been pinning it and uses it to drag her other hand away from his mouth, though he keeps a tight hold of it against the side of his jaw as he starts to pant and give these breathy, helpless moans as Liam really starts to explore. Hayden shifts so she can curl a little more around his head—careful not to dislodge his hand still squeezed around her thigh—and leans down a little more towards him, though she watches.

She _watches_.

It’s clear Liam really doesn’t have any idea what he’s doing but _equally_ clear that that’s not really handicapping him. In fact it might be making the whole experience _better_ , based on the way that Theo can’t seem to relax into the sensation, his abdomen clenching and his shoulders pressing tight to the bed as tries not to arch, his fingers tightening _hard_ around the various pieces of Hayden he’s holding. Liam doesn’t seem to notice his struggles, focused as he is on seeing how far down he can go, on experimenting with wrapping his fist around the part he can’t initially take, his lips sliding down to meet his fingers. He spends a few minutes like that, head bobbing and cheeks hollowing—Hayden sucks in her own sharp breath to match Theo’s the first time she spots him doing it—and Hayden eyes the rippling of Theo’s abdomen, his thighs, recognizing the signs of Theo getting close.

But Liam really seemed to have taken Hayden’s advice to heart. Just as Hayden’s getting ready to warn him, he pulls back abruptly and then just as abruptly buries his face in the crease of Theo’s hip and thigh, panting. He also _moans_ , long and loud, which is why Hayden swallows down her initial reaction to check on him, and waits.

 _Theo_ isn’t so patient, however. “I am going to _kill you_ ,” He hisses at Liam, kicking him in the back of the ribs with one of his heels. “You god damn—”

 _Tease_. Hayden’s entirely positive he’d been about to say _tease_ , but he abruptly shuts up, because Liam suddenly surges back upwards and then down again, and this time when he takes Theo back in his mouth he leaves his hand flat on Theo’s lower abdomen, and slides down to meet it. Theo sucks in a sharp breath and holds it, and Hayden’s about to wince, expecting Liam’s admittedly admirable enthusiasm to have consequences, when Liam throws a forearm over Theo’s stomach and bears _down_ ; Theo’s helplessly bucking hips barely manage a jerk. 

“Holy _sh—_ ” Theo starts to say, though it trails off into a surprised, high moan. “What the _fuck_ …”

With Liam’s arm over his hips Theo apparently gives up on controlling his helpless reactions, his feet sliding up to brace flat on the bed as he tries—and fails, though Hayden’s pretty sure that’s half the intention—to thrust up into the heat of Liam’s mouth. Liam just takes it, riding out the motions as he continues to bob his head, his other hand coming up to wrap under and then clutch _hard_ at one of Theo’s knees; Hayden can see the bruises that immediately form, and heal.

And then she looks down, because Theo had reached—flailed, really—the hand he’d had around her thigh up, clearly trying to find her face. Hayden catches his hand, squeezing it gently to let him know he has her attention since his eyes are squeezed tightly shut and his head is arched back. “Hayden,” He pants. “ _Hayden_ , _jesus_ , I’m—”

Hayden gets what he’s trying to tell her and squeezes his hand again, then drops it so that she can reach down and nudge at Liam’s forehead. Liam freezes, looking up at her—looking up at her _with his full mouth_ , _christ_ —and Hayden has to bite back a smile even as she shivers as she continues to press gently up against his skull.

“Not that I don’t admire the enthusiasm,” She tells him, “but maybe save that for next time.”

She says the last part nonchalantly, practically breezing right past it, but Liam’s eyes still widen and the force of his surprise is one of the main reasons that Hayden’s able to continue encouraging him up, up until Theo’s cock slips free from his mouth. Theo groans, and Hayden can clearly see Liam’s mouth open—no doubt to ask about the _next step_ , like he’s still trying to follow some manual—but Hayden takes pity on Theo and just ignores Liam, wrapping a hand around Theo and finishing him off with a few quick, tight strokes.

Liam watching Theo come might end up being one of Hayden’s favorite memories; his wide eyes rise to and then stay riveted on Theo’s face, watching raptly as Theo gasps and shudders his way through it.

“Oh,” Liam breathes, in a small, stunned voice. “Oh, wow.”

He’s so _earnest_ about it. Hayden can’t help it; she leans forward until she can get a hand on his jaw, encouraging him up and forward a little until she can kiss him, hard and deep. Liam makes a confused noise at first and then practically melts into it, one hand rising to tangle in her hair. The other he leaves wrapped around Theo’s ankle on the bed, Hayden sees when she pulls back, his middle finger and thumb meeting just underneath the bone of Theo’s ankle and holding tight.

He blinks a few times when their eyes catch, and Hayden realizes two things in quick succession: one, he’s still _dressed_ , absurdly enough, and two, he’s _hard_ in his jeans.

Really hard.

“I don’t think _either of you_ can really blame me,” He preemptively argues, a little breathy and high, apparently having noticed her noticing his state; his cheeks flush.

Theo’s practically a boneless sprawl of limbs next to them but he apparently can’t pass up a chance to snark Liam, even two orgasms deep. “You’re really missing the point of this whole exercise, aren’t you.”

Liam looks away from Hayden to glare at him. “Oh, I’m sorry I’m still _new to this_ , you as—”

He probably would have kept going, except that Hayden had recognized the exact twitch to his fingers against her thigh—Liam having let his hand fall absently down from her hair—and she’d just smothered a laugh against the side of his face, and reached for him. Liam cuts off with a sharp inhale as her hands land on his fly, and he jerks his attention back to her, all wide eyes and disbelieving expression.

“You think I don’t remember that supposed-to-be-subtle touch?” She asks him, grinning at him as she tips her chin at his still twitching fingers. “I remember that supposed-to-be-subtle touch.”

It’s the one he’d use when he was revved up, and desperate, but didn’t want her to _realize_ that he was revved up, and desperate; didn’t want her to feel pressured. And even though it’d never been a problem before, Hayden had always, _always_ appreciated the tiny, unspoken gesture, and she appreciates it now. 

She appreciates it now, and _more_.

“C’mon,” She coaxes, working his jeans and boxers over his hips, then: “C’mon, Liam. I want you to.”

She says the last part as a whisper, her mouth right up against his ear, and Liam _groans_ , and twists his head around to catch her mouth, kissing her hard. She can feel him moving as they kiss—can feel him finish shucking his jeans—and then he breaks briefly away from her as he yanks his shirt over his head. 

The momentary break gives Hayden time to glance over at Theo, a helpless sort of curious. But she needn’t have wondered; Theo catches her eyes, his own heavy-lidded, and grins, best he can, even as worn-out and pleasure-sated as he so obviously is. He reaches for her as Liam finishes getting his shirt pulled over his head and dives back in to kiss her, and helps guide her down onto the bed as Liam presses forward, and over her, his hips slotting in-between her own.

“This is going to be _really_ graceless,” Liam warns as he lines himself up, and Hayden can’t help but laugh, touched and a little delighted, even as next to her Theo just snorts.

“I’ll give points for enthusiasm, how’s that?” Hayden offers, and then yelps out another laugh when he fakes a glare and lunges for her mouth in a biting, playful rebuke of a kiss.

And then he slides inside, and suddenly she’s not laughing anymore.

It’s exactly as graceless as Liam had predicted, but probably not for the reasons either of them— _any_ of them—had expected, because Hayden’s eyes immediately start to burn the second his hips come to rest flush with hers. Startled and a little embarrassed by the sudden surge of emotion—this deep and unexpected burst of warm _memory_ , like coming home—she curls up and around him, hiding her face in the side of his neck even though she _knows_ the move isn’t going to fool either of them; that it’s going to make her sudden change in mood all the more obvious. 

But she’s not the only one affected, apparently; Liam makes a soft noise and turns his face into her hair, and when his breath shudders loose of his chest, Hayden doesn’t think it’s because of the slick interlocking of their bodies—it sounds too close to a sob. _Hi, again_ , she thinks nonsensically, curling a little tighter into him as she feels wetness escape out from between her squeezed-shut eyes, and just holds onto him as he holds onto her.

After a half minute or so Liam pushes up, a little, and Hayden relaxes her hold to let him. He studies her face for a few seconds, one of his hands coming up to cradle her cheek, his thumb brushing some of the dampness away from just underneath her eye. “Hey,” He whispers, and then leans down to kiss the skin under his thumb, light and brushing. 

And then he sits up, some, and flails out a hand a little clumsily for Theo laying wide-eyed next to them, Theo’s mouth dropped softly open as he stares at them and a poleaxed expression on his face. 

“Here, c’mere,” Liam orders, somehow managing to snag one of Theo’s hands and dragging it over, back towards Hayden and himself. “Come make yourself useful.”

Theo’s too surprised to do anything but cooperate; Hayden realizes that, even if Liam doesn’t. She smiles helplessly at Theo as Liam’s tugging essentially forces him over onto his side, and Theo meets her eyes for a second before his expression twists and he surges forward to bury his face in her shoulder. It doesn’t answer the question of what Liam had wanted from him—how Liam planned to _make Theo useful_ —but Hayden’s fiercely glad for the connection, and so, so strangely and helplessly proud of Liam for it. 

And then she _does_ get it, because she feels the pad of one of Theo’s fingers on her clit.

“Oh,” She gasps, her legs tightening around Liam’s hips as she feels Liam’s hand drag away across her stomach, leaving Theo’s behind; to her side, Theo shudders out a soundless moan and closes his teeth around the meat of her shoulder.

“Okay, alright,” Liam mutters, like he’s double-checking all his stage directions; the thought makes Hayden grin, shakily, and turn her face against the top of Theo’s head. “Just—graceless, remember? _Really_ graceless.”

And then he folds back over her, and starts to move.

Hayden immediately has to cry out and wrap her arms tightly back around Liam’s shoulders, burying her face once more in his neck not because she’s trying to hide but because she’s instantly overwhelmed by _sensation_. She’d already been the best kind of worked over to begin with, and the added stimulation of Theo’s carefully circling finger just exponentially increases the pleasure already coiling tight in her gut. It doesn’t help that Theo seems to recover himself, eventually, and leans up on his free elbow to slide his free hand down over her shoulder so that he can frame the ridge of Hayden’s left collarbone between his thumb and forefinger.

“C’mon, Liam,” He coaxes, and Hayden can see him grinning at Liam when Liam turns his face from where he’d had his forehead braced against Hayden’s sternum. “Here, right? This is where Hayden said you always—”

He doesn’t get a chance to finish; Liam seems to realize exactly what he means and surges over to capture Theo’s mouth, kissing him hard and harshly even as his thrusting hips never lose their rhythm. Hayden moans at the sight, and then her breath hitches in her chest, because Liam drops his mouth down and fastens his teeth around her collarbone, right in between Theo’s framing fingers.

Hayden comes again just like that, with Liam’s teeth in her skin and Theo’s finger still working her clit and Liam’s hips pressed up flush against hers as he comes, too.

A half minute or so later he finally recovers enough to pull back, and Hayden isn’t sure exactly what she expects him to do but what he _does_ is flop—admittedly—gracelessly onto his back on her other side, opposite of Theo. Hayden feels approximately like she’d just run some kind of marathon—which she arguably kind of _did_ , if a less traditional one—and she just finds herself staring up at the ceiling, trying to recover her breath and feeling in her toes and her general ability to _think_ , because she and Theo and Liam have officially come to the end of their collective insane idea, and now they’re going to have to figure out what to do next. 

She turns her head to glance at Theo, who’s still up one elbow and watching them both carefully, but before she can fully interpret the look on his face or say something or encourage him to _lay down_ , the three of them lined up crosswise on her bed, Liam suddenly blows out a huge gust of air, startling her and—from the way he jumps—Theo as well.

“That,” Liam announces contemplatively to the ceiling, “was _not at all_ how I imagined this going, when I was driving up here.”

And Hayden can’t help it—she _laughs_.

\---

Eventually Hayden calms down, and stops laughing—Theo and Liam beside her also shaking with their own laughter, as startled as they’d initially been by hers—and makes the executive decision that they all have to clean up, because as enthusiastic a participant as she’d been in getting to her current state, she’s starting to feel a little gross.

Theo—after a conversation held entirely between their squinting eyes and furrowing eyebrows—she lets go use his shower in the basement, but she’s not sure Liam isn’t going to suffer some kind of time-delayed panic attack if left unsupervised, and him she drags with her into the hallway bathroom. It turns out to be the exact right call: as Hayden is distracted fiddling with the _incredibly_ temperamental knobs to get water that is neither ice-cold nor boiling hot, Liam goes a suspicious sort of silent. Hayden glances over her shoulder at him as she finishes testing the water pouring out of the faucet and, satisfied, gets the shower started, and finds him staring at the floor with that expression like an open wound back on his face.

“Hey,” She murmurs carefully, and takes a small step towards him.

Liam’s eyes snap up to hers. He stares at her for a few seconds, and then his expression twists up. “Hayden, I’m so sorry,” He gasps out, and Hayden feels a helpless flare of frustration in her chest, but she doesn’t get a chance to say _we’ve been over this_ , or whatever, because Liam shakes his head slightly and mutters, blushing slightly, “Not about that.”

Hayden waits. The water is running behind her but she doesn’t _care_ , all her attention on Liam as he bites his lip, and looks away from her, his arms coming up to cross protectively over his chest and his shoulders starting to hunch in.

“I’m sorry about—about just showing up here, and the—the _scene_ that, you’re right, I did—I did stage,” He confesses, all in a sudden rush; a torrent of helpless words. “I just, I _couldn’t_ …” He stops and closes his eyes, and sucks in a deep breath, and blows it out again, all the way, before opening his eyes back up and looking back at her. “I wasn’t thinking clearly, and I just _acted_.”

And Hayden—Hayden feels warmth bloom in her chest. She takes the single step forward necessary to put her in a position so that she can reach up and take Liam’s face in her hands, her thumbs brushing over his cheeks as he looks up at her, guilt and regret and _hope_ all over his face.

“You? Not thinking clearly? Just _acting?_ ” Hayden repeats, her voice a soft tease. “Now that doesn’t sound like you _at all_.”

Even with the fondness blunting every sharp edge of Hayden’s words, Liam still flinches. Hayden feels her own mouth twist as she studies his downcast eyes, and then she leans her forehead against his.

“Hey, can I tell you something?” She asks, very quietly into the scant space left between them; Liam’s eyes flick up to hers. 

She smiles, just a small, quirked thing, and cards her fingers back through his hair, holding on and holding on and _holding on_.

“I’m glad you did,” She whispers, and _means it_ , her heart in her chest fluttering with the force of it and her quirked smile becoming a wide, helpless grin.

Liam stares at her for a long few seconds, and then he surges into her, knocking her back a few steps and burying his face in her neck.

They clean up quickly once they actually get in the shower, but spend long enough under the water that it starts to cool, just holding onto each other. Liam keeps his face hidden in her neck for most of it, his arms dropped to wrap around her waist to hold her to him. Hayden lets him, her temple pressed against the side of his head and her arms folded around his back, her fingers tracing idling patterns across his slick skin.

“I missed you,” He confesses hoarsely at one point, his arms spasming around her hips, and Hayden tightens her own arms around his back and turns her face against the top of his skull, her eyes squeezing shut.

“I missed you, too,” She tells him. And then, hearing the distinctive sound of footsteps on the basement stairs, Liam’s head perking up some as he apparently hears them, too, she adds, very softly, “ _We_ missed you.”

Liam pulls back to look at her, his eyes searching her face, and then he leans forward and kisses her.

Liam’s clothes are a mess that he tries to nonetheless guiltily slink back into until Hayden realizes what he’s doing and smacks him, throwing his towel in his face and turning to open the bathroom door to yell down at Theo to bring Liam something to wear. But Theo’s anticipated Liam’s needs, apparently; Hayden blinks down at the pile of sweats and a t-shirt left just outside the bathroom door and smiles, helplessly, before bending down to scoop them up.

She detours briefly to her bedroom to put on her own pair of sweatpants and shirt and then wanders back out into the hallway to find Liam lingering awkwardly in the bathroom doorway, now fully dressed. The pants are a little long and the shirt a little baggy, but Hayden doesn’t think self-consciousness is Liam’s main concern; his nostrils keep flaring as he shifts from foot to foot in Theo’s borrowed clothes, and his eyes have a little more pupil to them than she’d expect, even given the dim lighting. Rolling her eyes, Hayden pulls him out of the doorway and then pushes him gently between his shoulder-blades out towards the rest of the house, which is beginning to smell mouth-wateringly of garlic and spices.

“Hey,” Theo greets quietly when Hayden and Liam walk into the kitchen, Hayden stepping around Liam with a huff as he stumbles to a stop just in front of the kitchen table. He nods to the neat row of bowls he has lined up on the counter, which Hayden realizes, after leaning over to check, are filled with the chili she’d disinterestedly made a few days ago in a doomed effort to procrastinate doing her English reading. “I don’t know about you two, but I worked up _quite_ the appetite.”

He says it deliberately smarmy, Hayden knows, looking for her reaction. She gives it to him, rolling her eyes and bumping him with her shoulder as she retrieves the rightmost bowl, Theo picking up the closest one to pop it into the microwave.

Retrieving a handful of spoons from the silverware drawer, Hayden drops one into the bowl and then holds it out, behind herself. “Here, you take this one,” She tells Liam, and doesn’t give him a chance to say no—doesn’t acknowledge the look on his face as he watches the way she and Theo easily navigate the kitchen with and around each other—just wiggles it expectantly until Liam reaches out, and takes it. 

Eating at the table is not only the more civilized move but also the one least likely to led to stains, but Hayden leads them all out to the couch regardless. She plops down into the middle cushion—aware, and a strange mix of benignly frustrated and helplessly amused at the wary looks Theo and Liam keep pretending they’re not shooting each other—and reaches for the remote, settling on the first random cop show she sees solely for the background noise. Theo sits down on her left first, clearly ahead of Liam in his attempts at casualness, but he doesn’t actually take a bite of his food until Liam finally lowers himself gingerly down on her other side. 

Smarmy delivery or not, Theo had been right about working up an appetite; once they all start eating, they pretty much inhale their food. It helps lessen some of the awkwardness, too, all of them too focused on eating and—in Hayden’s and Theo’s case, random knowledge gleaned practically by osmosis from living with Val—mocking the police tactics on screen, but as they finish scraping their bowls clean and set them one by one on the coffee table, tension starts to creep back in. Hayden sits in the middle of Theo’s and Liam’s apparent continued inability to talk to one another for a half minute or so, just waiting, and then she gives up, and groans, and twists to let herself fall sideways.

Theo blinks owlishly down at her, her head now in his lap, and then his lips quirk in a small smile as he brings a hand forward to cradle the top of her skull, his thumb stroking gently over her forehead. “Hey, Liam,” He finally says, still looking at her, and then he looks up and over at Liam directly for the first time since they’d all left Hayden’s bedroom. “Grab the remote and find something else, will you? I’ve heard Val’s rant about proper evidence handling procedures enough times now to recite it from memory, I can’t handle this any longer.’

Liam stares wide-eyed at him for a moment, his hands tightening around where they’d dropped to wrap around Hayden’s calves now in his lap, and then he says, “Sure,” inanely, and leans carefully forward to retrieve the remote.

It’s not _not_ awkward, after that, Liam flicking and flicking through channels before eventually settling on some mindless action movie, but it inches its way to becoming less so as time goes on. Part of that is Liam’s and Theo’s complete inability to resist commenting on the movie, and then snarking each other about their comments, and then devolving into completely unrelated—if harmless—arguments within minutes. They instantly veer away from any topic that looks like it might come even close to opening up the Pandora’s box of capital-I _issues_ left between all of them, but Hayden—Hayden starts to think that’s okay.

She starts to think they’ve got time to figure it out; that they’re going to allow themselves—each of them individually, and together—to have time to figure it out. 

And then Liam’s phone vibrates angrily against his thigh for the fifth time in three minutes, Hayden feeling it against her legs still in his lap, and Hayden gets the feeling that Liam’s run out of time on a _different_ issue; that his grace period for having disappeared from Beacon Hills is officially up. 

“That’s Scott, isn’t it,” Hayden says, not a question, and Liam colors in the flickering lights of the TV screen.

“...probably,” He agrees, and then he winces and gives up on apparently ignoring his phone and arches up some so he can slide it out of his pants’— _Theo’s_ pants—pocket. “Yes,” He confirms, wincing; Hayden’s willing to bet he has some choice texts from Scott, as well.

“He figure out you came here?” Theo guesses idly, though tension starts to creep into his limbs; his thigh under Hayden’s head starts to go rigid.

“He says that—and I quote— _while Hayden probably already tore you several new ones_ , if I don’t get my ass back to Beacon Hills post-haste, he’s sending Argent to come get me,” Liam recites, tone a dry sort of resigned.

Hayden grins and prods at his hip with her bare foot. “Guess you’re in the doghouse,” She quips, and grins wider when he groans—Theo groaning above her, too—at the pun.

Still, he bites his lip, the fingers of the hand not holding his phone spasming around Hayden’s calf. “I guess I’d…I think I’d better go,” He says quietly. His eyes flick first to Hayden’s, and then to Theo’s, before he looks back down at his phone, though Hayden doesn’t think he’s seeing it. “He really is mad, I think. He may have, uh.” Liam winces. “He may have made me swear I wouldn’t do anything rash.”

“Nailed that one,” Theo comments dryly, and then has to duck when Liam chucks a throw pillow at him; Hayden makes a complaint when Theo jostles her.

But she steels herself, after, and slowly pulls her legs free of Liam’s lap; slowly sits up, and off of Theo’s thigh. “Okay,” She tells Liam, making sure to keep her tone as easy as possible, though it’s hard with the sudden storm of butterflies in her stomach.

She pushes herself up, then, fully intending to walk him to the door, even though it’s less than ten feet away and Liam definitely knows where to find it, but Liam doesn’t move. Theo doesn’t either, but Hayden’s less surprised by that; she trades a furrowed-brow look with him when Liam just keeps staring down at his locked phone, tilting it back and forth in his grip, but Theo just shrugs, clearly just as clueless.

And then all at once he looks up at Theo, and intently enough that Theo leans back some, clearly taken aback by the force of his attention. “I’ll—I’ll need to return your clothes,” Liam tells him, all in a rush and plucking pointedly at the shirt he’s wearing, like Theo might have forgotten that he’d lent Liam his current outfit.

Theo’s about to tell him not to worry about it, Hayden can see the thought all over his face, and she feels something panicked jam up in her throat as she hurries to cut him off. “You could bring them back,” She offers to Liam, her wide eyes meeting his as he snaps his attention over to her, instead. Some of her courage falters as they stare at each other, though, and she swallows and blinks a few times as she looks away, adding, “If—if you wanted.”

“Actually I was thinking you could come pick them up,” He hurries to counter, his lips flickering in an unsure smile as he tries, and mostly fails, to smile at her. He darts a look at Theo and then refocuses on her. “This—this Sunday?” He winces at his own question mark, but soldiers on regardless. “There’s a—a pack…dinner. Thing. Barbecue. Scott’s hosting—well, really Ms. McCall is hosting it, but…”

He trails off his rambling with another wince, one eye closing as he sneaks glances back and forth between Hayden and Theo. Hayden doesn’t know what’s on her own face but Theo’s eyebrows have practically merged with his hairline.

“You want us to come to a pack dinner?” He double-checks, and sounds as incredulous as he looks.

Liam colors, and drops his gaze back into his lap. Hayden stares at the top of his head for a few long seconds, and then switches her attention over to Theo, who immediately looks up at her. Whatever he sees on her face must catch him off-guard, because he gapes at her.

But the butterflies in Hayden’s stomach are back and in-flight once more, only this time their fluttering feels a whole lot more like _possibility_ than uncertainty. She blurts out, “Yes,” before Theo’s surprise or her own nerves can get the better of her.

Liam’s eyes snap up, and to hers. He stares at her, disbelief all over his face, but as she just looks back at him—as she gives him a shaky smile—it starts to transmute into a wide, helpless grin. 

“Okay,” He agrees. “Okay, that’s—” And then he cuts off, jumping, because his phone vibrates again. He glances down at it and then pales, immediately jumping to his feet as he swears _shit, shit, fuck_ , and hurries to answer it. “ _Don’t_ send Argent,” He immediately begs, clearly talking to Scott. “I’m leaving now, I swear.”

“He really is,” Hayden says, grinning and raising her voice so that Scott can hear her; Liam gives her a desperate look of gratitude and mouths _thank you_. There’re a few seconds of stunned silence on the line; Scott clearly wasn’t expecting to hear from her, and she’s willing to bet he _definitely_ wasn’t expecting her to sound so cheerful. Biting her lip, Hayden darts a brief glance at Theo still sitting shellshocked on the couch and then adds, “And we can—we can all talk about what happened this Sunday, at dinner.”

 _No going back now_ , Hayden thinks, staring at the naked surprise that takes over Liam’s face; hearing Theo’s sharp inhale as he apparently realizes what she’d just done.

Scott’s voice is tinny through the phone, and made all the more mechanical-sounding by whatever shocked look must be on his face, but after a few long seconds he clearly says, “Oh, uh. Yeah, okay. That’d be—that’d be great,” and then—after extracting a few more assurances from Liam that he’s _really leaving, seriously on my way out the door as we speak, I swear_ —finally lets Liam hang up.

But even once he’s lowered his now-dark phone, Liam still spends a few seconds just staring at her. Hayden colors some, and shrugs, and then almost immediately squeaks out a surprised noise when Liam suddenly surges forward and kisses her.

“I—I really have to go,” He tells her, which she knows—she’d heard Scott—but Liam just adds, “But—Sunday, right? I’ll see you Sunday?”

But Hayden doesn’t answer, right away. Instead she turns her head some to look at Theo, who jerks his gaze up to hers and then spends a few seconds just staring helplessly at her. But:

“Yeah,” Theo finally agrees, speaking it to Liam but still looking at Hayden. “Yeah, you’ll see us Sunday.”

Liam’s expression twists—Hayden sees it out of the corner of her eye—and then all at once he makes a noise and practically _launches_ himself at Theo, who makes a startled sound but still manages to catch him. Liam kisses Theo hard, his hands tight around Theo’s face, and then he rips himself backwards and scrambles to his feet. 

“Sunday,” He repeats like an invocation, like a talisman, glancing back and forth between Hayden and Theo now blinking owlishly up at him from the couch, his mouth red and his hair once again a mess. 

“Sunday,” Hayden agrees quietly, and smiles at Liam when his eyes snap to hers.

Liam leaves in a rush, after that, like he’s afraid that if he doesn’t leave _now_ , he isn’t going to leave at all. Hayden follows him to the door as he pulls on his shoes and then scoops up his dirty clothes, making a face down at them before coloring and jerking his eyes up and away from them. He darts in to kiss her one last time as she holds the door open for him, and then he’s down and hurrying towards his SUV still parked in the driveway; Hayden watches him, smiling softly, until he climbs in and backs out, and then she closes the door, and locks it.

Theo’s still right where he had been—right where he’d kept himself throughout the entirety of Hayden’s and Liam’s graceless negotiation—and he gives her an evaluating look as she walks slowly back over to him. 

“You realize that Sunday is going to be the most awkward dinner in the history of awkward dinners, right?” He asks, his tone a deliberate sort of offhandedly mild, but Hayden isn’t fooled; she ducks down until she can slide into his arms, pushing him back flat against the couch as she goes and sprawling out on top of him as she buries her helpless smile in his neck.

“Yeah,” She agrees, and smiles even wider and more helplessly as his arms come up around her; as he presses his lips to the crown of her head. “I know.”

She’s looking forward to it.

**Author's Note:**

> First: I hope everyone liked it. Second, and more importantly: DON'T HAVE SEX WITHOUT CONDOMS OR OTHER BIRTH CONTROL, unless you're ready for that. I took some artistic license in this story because I _could_ , but real life has real-life consequences.
> 
> Third, the "and it's...one of the reasons Hayden can’t be as angry with him as she’d like" line was whole-sale inspired by an almost identical line from [Triage](https://archiveofourown.org/works/758133) by [Fahye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fahye/pseuds/Fahye). The brilliance goes entirely to them, but the line fit too perfectly not to use.
> 
> Finally, all feedback loved! If you liked, please consider a comment or a [reblog](https://eneiryu.tumblr.com/post/189561984560/called-to-the-shepherd-said-theres-a-wolf-at-the)!


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